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1

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR OCCUPATIONAL

SAFETY AND HEALTH 

+ + + + +

ADVISORY BOARD ON RADIATION AND

WORKER HEALTH 

+ + + + +

FERNALD WORK GROUP

+ + + + +

THURSDAY,

DECEMBER 4, 2014

+ + + + +

The Work Group meeting convened in 

the London Room of the Cincinnati Airport 

Marriott Hotel, 2395 Progress Drive, Hebron, 

Kentucky, at 9:00 a.m., Brad Clawson, Chairman, 

presiding.

PRESENT:

BRADLEY P. CLAWSON, Chairman

PAUL L. ZIEMER, Member

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2

ALSO PRESENT:

TED KATZ, Designated Federal Official

MATT ARNO, ORAU Team*

RAY BEATTY*

HANS BEHLING, SC&A*

NANCY CHALMERS, ORAU Team*

MARK FISHBURN, ORAU Team*

STU HINNEFELD, DCAS

KAREN KENT, ORAU Team*

JOSH KINMAN, DCAS*

TOM LABONE, ORAU Team*

JENNY LIN, HHS*

MARK ROLFES, DCAS

BOB BARTON, SC&A

JOYCE LIPSZTEIN, SC&A*

MATTHEW SMITH, ORAU Team*

JOHN STIVER, SC&A

*Present via telephone

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3

T-A-B-L-E O-F C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S

Welcome

Ted Katz ................................. 4

Roll Call and Introductions ............... 5

Work Group Discussion

Brad Clawson ............................. 9

John Stiver .............................. 9

Bob Barton .............................. 10

Summary of post-SEC thorium methodology and

in vivo coworker model for the 1979-1988

time frame

 Stu Hinnefeld .......................... 11

SC&A presentation of new White Paper: Review of

Proposed NIOSH Methods for Reconstructing 

Thorium

Doses at Fernald (1979-2006)

 Bob Barton ............................. 17

Continued issues resolution for SC&A Site

Profile Review findings ................. 111

Work Group plans for the future ......... 236

Adjourn ................................. 238

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4

1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

2 (9:01 a.m.)

3 MR. KATZ: Okay. Good morning. 

4 This is the Advisory Board on Radiation Worker 

5 Health, Fernald Work Group. We're ready to go 

6 here. 

7 Just a few notes: The materials for 

8 today should be all on the NIOSH website, the 

9 agenda and the materials that we're discussing, 

10 including the presentation from SC&A. You'll 

11 find them on the NIOSH website under the DCAS 

12 portion, the Advisory Board, today's meetings. 

13 And if you go to today's meetings, those 

14 documents should all be there. You can just

15 open them up.

16 And we're speaking about a site, so, 

17 please, everyone, in going through roll call, 

18 address conflict of interest as well. And 

19 let's begin with that.

20 I have a note that Mark Griffon, 

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5

1 who’s a Member, will be joining us a little bit 

2 late, maybe around 9:30, but let's go with roll 

3 call starting with the Board in the room.

4 (Roll call.)

5 MR. KATZ: Okay, then. Well, 

6 we'll probably, as I said, have Mark Griffon 

7 join us a little late. He doesn't have a 

8 conflict with respect to what we're addressing 

9 at Fernald.

10 And we're ready. So, please, 

11 everyone on the line mute your phones except 

12 when you're addressing the group. If you don't 

13 have a mute button, press *6 to mute your phone 

14 and then press *6 again to take your phone off 

15 of mute. Much thanks.

16 And, Brad, it's your meeting.

17 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Okay. We do 

18 have a couple White Papers that were issued by 

19 NIOSH, one for the K65 silo -- well, actually 

20 two of them, one by Stu Hinnefeld -- both of them 

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6

1 by Stu Hinnefeld. There's an addendum. Just 

2 want to make sure that people have those before 

3 we speak to them.

4 John, I'll let you take it over from 

5 here and we'll start out.

6 MR. STIVER: Okay. Thanks, Brad. 

7 Those of you on Live Meeting, I've got the 

8 agenda pulled up and the way I've kind of 

9 envisioned this thing going. The first thing 

10 I want to talk about is our review of NIOSH's 

11 White Paper titled, "Review of Proposed NIOSH 

12 Methods for Reconstructing Thorium Doses at 

13 Fernald from 1979 to 2006." This is the 

14 post-SEC thorium methodology that was 

15 released, I believe, back in June of this year.

16 We finished up our review early in 

17 November and delivered it to the Work Group, I 

18 believe, on the 17th. It might have been maybe 

19 a little later than that.

20 But, anyway, Bob Barton has got a 

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7

1 presentation on that and we'll probably go 

2 ahead and lead off with that. After that 

3 discussion is finished, I believe we can go 

4 ahead and continue on the issues matrix 

5 resolution, of which the K65 silos is one of the 

6 open issues, I believe Number 25. And there 

7 are about -- I counted up about 11 open issues 

8 that we can discuss today.

9 And so, with that, Bob, you want to 

10 take over?

11 MR. BARTON: Yes, thanks, John. 

12 Well, I think it's probably best to give 

13 everyone sort of a refresher on what the 

14 proposed methods for reconstructing thorium 

15 intakes actually are during this period. So I 

16 have a couple slides on it, but do you guys want 

17 to do a little summary on it? Or I can just 

18 go --

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I'll give 

20 just a little historical aspect of the site at 

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8

1 this time. In other words, the first SEC at 

2 Fernald for all workers extends through '78 

3 now, right? '78?

4 MR. STIVER: '78.

5 MR. HINNEFELD: The basis for that 

6 mainly being that for the '68 to '79 period was 

7 that the in vivo monitoring results for that 

8 period were reported in milligrams of thorium 

9 and there's just not a consistently convincing 

10 way to determine what that means in terms of 

11 radioactive constituents. And so that Class 

12 was added up through '78.

13 Now, in '79 -- I think it was '79, 

14 or '78, one of those years -- the mobile counter 

15 results began to be reported on the constituent 

16 daughter product radionuclides that you can 

17 count with a gamma counter, with a -- it shows

18 up as a lead-212 and I think there’s a 

19 actinium-228 or something. So we feel like 

20 those results now are sufficient. We can 

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9

1 interpret those results. 

2 We also have access to all of the in 

3 vivo counts that were performed, the results of 

4 all of the in vivo counts that were performed 

5 with the mobile counter. So that's the 

6 entirety of the in vivo counts. Later on, we 

7 only have in vivo counts for claims. Our paper 

8 goes into quite a lot of detail about the 

9 construction of, the analysis of the data, the 

10 construction of what it looks like. That 

11 coworker model is essentially, I believe, done, 

12 I think.

13 At Fernald at this time, '79 was 

14 essentially the end of any thorium processing. 

15 And from that point forward, thorium existed in 

16 storage in warehouses and in some bins and 

17 things like that. You call them bins. 

18 Sometimes they call them silos. And there was 

19 some thorium solution, thorium nitrate 

20 solution in large tanks. And so there was not 

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10

1 any really routine exposure, internal exposure 

2 to thorium, with the possible exception of some 

3 overpacking of drums that would deteriorate. 

4 Some of the materials were stored in 

5 very -- it was a high-quality product and they 

6 were stored in containers that were in good 

7 shape decades later. They were in really good 

8 shape decades later. Some of the drums, the 

9 material had a heavy moisture content and it was 

10 kind of corrosive to the drums. So some of the 

11 materials corroded the drums and those drums on 

12 occasion would have to be re-packed.

13 At this point, you can't really tell 

14 who was engaged in those overpacking 

15 operations, and so our approach is to provide 

16 some sort of bounding estimate for dose 

17 reconstruction during that time. I think 

18 maybe Bob's going to -- you’re going to cover 

19 kind of what the approach is?

20 MR. BARTON: Sure. I can do that, 

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11

1 yeah.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So, anyway, 

3 that's kind of the setting here for what the 

4 thorium was. 

5 And then ultimately there were a 

6 series of remediation tasks, when the site was 

7 in remediation, where these thorium materials 

8 had to be removed from storage, placed in 

9 suitable containers, if they weren't already, 

10 and then dispositioned somewhere. If there 

11 was good product material, somebody may have 

12 wanted them. Really at the time hardly anybody 

13 wanted thorium anymore, so I think the vast 

14 majority of it was disposed of as waste in 

15 various ways. 

16 A couple of those remediation tasks 

17 were subcontracted tasks. Like the 

18 disposition of the thorium nitrate was a 

19 subcontracted task. And removal of the 

20 thorium from Plant 8 -- they're either called 

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12

1 silos or bins. Sometimes they'd use one word; 

2 sometimes they'd use another. That was a 

3 subcontractor task as well. So all those 

4 removals, all those remediations, are also 

5 described in the paper we wrote about how these 

6 materials were removed.

7 So there's a period of time from 

8 about 1988 when the mobile counter was replaced 

9 by the fixed counter, the fixed in vivo counter. 

10 From that point forward, we don't necessarily 

11 have every in vivo result in our records. We 

12 have the in vivo results from claims from that 

13 point forward. 

14 The in vivo results, all this time, 

15 from '79 on, people were not in vivo'd because 

16 they were thorium exposed. They were in vivo'd 

17 because of potential uranium exposure. But 

18 the in vivo counters spit out thorium results 

19 anyway. So if there was a thorium intake from 

20 one of those overpacking operations, it should 

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13

1 show up in that person's in vivo record. 

2 Let's see, what else did I want to 

3 say about this? At some point somewhere in the 

4 '90s, the site adopted a 100 percent BZ sampling 

5 requirement for thorium. And so I believe we 

6 chose '95 as the start date when there seemed 

7 to be a really robust set of thorium in vivo --

8 or thorium BZ air monitoring data. From that 

9 point forward, the method that we're proposing 

10 is to use the BZ sampling record as the record 

11 of the exposure.

12 And in that interim period, our 

13 original proposal was to use some fraction of 

14 the exposure standard. Again, there's 

15 evidence that these projects then were 

16 controlled by air sampling. The people who 

17 went in wore respiratory protection and so 

18 shouldn't have exceeded like 10 percent of the 

19 airborne standard during the work.

20 And then we also, I think, started 

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14

1 to investigate the possibility of do we have 

2 enough in vivo data from claim files to build 

3 a coworker model. And would that be a suitable 

4 model, since we don't have all? We only have 

5 claimants. So I think we started some work on 

6 that. 

7 Anyway, I think maybe I'll be quiet 

8 and let people who know more about it talk more 

9 than me. 

10 MR. BARTON: Okay. Thanks, Stu.

11 We'll go over sort of the proposed 

12 methods for dose reconstruction first and then 

13 we'll sort of talk about each one in turn.

14 Again, for those of you have access 

15 to Live Meeting, the presentation is up right 

16 now. For those of you don't, that presentation 

17 is also on the website, as Ted pointed out.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Before you 

19 start --

20 MR. BARTON: Yeah.

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15

1 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- I was just 

2 looking at my emails from Zaida. She didn't 

3 send me the connecting thing for this meeting.

4 MR. KATZ: I'm going to send it to 

5 you right now.

6 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Would you send 

7 it to me, too, Ted?

8 MR. KATZ: Yeah.

9 MR. BARTON: Okay. I guess I'll 

10 talk slowly until --

11 (Laughter)

12 MR. KATZ: No, that's all right. 

13 That’s fine

14 MR. BARTON: Basically, as Stu sort 

15 of mentioned, the --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Excuse me, do you 

17 have something different than what's on the 

18 meeting papers?

19 MR. HINNEFELD: No, this is 

20 exactly --

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16

1 (Simultaneous speaking.)

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Is it the one that 

3 was on the meeting papers?

4 MR. KATZ: Yes.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: On the regular 

6 page?

7 MR. HINNEFELD: On our website.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: On the website? 

9 So I can pull it up there.

10 MR. KATZ: Yeah, I'm going to 

11 forward it to you. I've just got to do one 

12 thing to be able to do that. 

13 MR. BARTON: Okay. Anyway, the DR 

14 methods for internal thorium can really be 

15 effectively split into three periods. You 

16 have the 1979 to 1989 period, which uses the 

17 mobile counter in vivo data. Then you have the 

18 1990 to 1994 period where, for unmonitored 

19 doses, the proposal is some fraction of the 

20 derived air concentration at the time. And 

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17

1 then the third period is from 1995 to 2006, 

2 where the breathing zone results for workers, 

3 which are contained in the HIS-20 and also for 

4 claimants in the individual claim files from 

5 DoE are contained.

6 These periods, as Stu kind of 

7 mentioned, are sort of delineated by what 

8 methods are being employed, whether it was the 

9 mobile counter, the derived air concentration 

10 of breathing zone, the availability of the 

11 data. As Stu mentioned, from 1990 to 1994, 

12 when they had the fixed counter, all you really 

13 had were claimant records, so we didn't have a 

14 full monitored population there with which to 

15 really build a coworker model. And then in the 

16 later period, you do again have in vivo results, 

17 but only for claimants, but you also have this 

18 fairly robust breathing zone program, which we 

19 will get into.

20 The methods themselves and how 

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18

1 they're going to be applied are on pages 12 and 

2 13 of NIOSH's White Paper on the approach to 

3 reconstructing thorium doses, which we're 

4 going to take a look at right now. 

5 So we see with this table -- I said 

6 three periods. It's sort of four periods based 

7 on whether you have in vivo data for the 

8 claimants. But that first line in the table 

9 you see here, 1979 to 1994, if in vivo exists, 

10 then you're obviously going to use that data for 

11 the individual claimant. 

12 From 1979 to 1989, if in vivo 

13 doesn't exist for a claimant, that's when we use 

14 the coworker model based on the mobile counter 

15 results. 

16 Again, in 1990 to 1994, if you don't 

17 have in vivo data, then this is where the 

18 fraction, the 10 percent of the thorium, its 

19 Class W-derived air concentration would be used 

20 for unmonitored workers.

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19

1 And then this final period here, 

2 1995 to 2006, if you have in vivo, you're sort 

3 of left with a choice. You can evaluate it. 

4 If it was a positive result, you'd either then 

5 have to decide whether that was from a previous 

6 exposure, possibly from the earlier period in 

7 the 1980s. If it's not, if there's evidence 

8 that that positive lung burden occurred in the 

9 1995 to 2006 period, you would definitely use 

10 that in vivo result, but otherwise the 

11 breathing zone data is considered the data of 

12 choice to use.

13 So I'm going to talk a little bit 

14 about the selection of what's considered a 

15 thorium worker during this first period from 

16 1979 to 1989. And the NIOSH White Paper 

17 indicates essentially seven job types. And 

18 I'll just read them off here. You have 

19 chemical operators, fork truck drivers, 

20 laborers, transportation laborers, 

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20

1 operations, production workers and maintenance 

2 personnel. And we discussed this a bit 

3 at the last meeting in September. I'm going to 

4 quote Stu here. He's a very quotable guy. To 

5 quote, "And we'd be pretty encompassing about 

6 that. You figure almost anybody in operations 

7 could have done that. Most anybody in 

8 maintenance. Transportation could have been 

9 involved in it. You have safety and health 

10 people. Might have security people there. So 

11 you've got to be pretty inclusive."

12 Now, in the second period, from 1990 

13 to 1994, when it's proposed to use the 10 

14 percent of the derived air concentration 

15 values, the selection of workers for which you 

16 would assign unmonitored thorium doses is as 

17 follows from the White Paper: “From 1990 to

18 1994, thorium workers with no in vivo results 

19 or with pre-job fecal sample results during 

20 this employment period are recommended to be 

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21

1 assigned a dose.” So, essentially, based on 

2 the proposed methodology, you have to have that 

3 pre-job fecal sample to be considered for an 

4 unmonitored thorium dose.

5 And then unmonitored workers in 

6 that third period, from 1995 to 2006, would not 

7 be assigned any coworker dose.

8 Also, the NIOSH White Paper 

9 provides methods for calculating thoron 

10 exposure to thorium-related activities. And 

11 as you can see on this slide here, there's 

12 essentially three time periods that were 

13 considered and three sort of areas and/or 

14 activities that you would consider. And those 

15 values are given in working level months per 

16 year. 

17 And, again, we're going to get into 

18 our review topics on each of these facets. I 

19 just want to lay out what the DR methods are that 

20 are currently proposed.

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22

1 As far as the thoron approach, the 

2 White Paper doesn't necessarily specify who 

3 would be assigned thoron. As you saw on this 

4 previous table, they do give an area of the 

5 plant. Storage facilities and repackaging are 

6 a number of places. And then closure and 

7 various storage activities. Again, that's 

8 sort of all of the plant. And then you have in 

9 1979, pretty much for the period of interest, 

10 the pilot plant. 

11 However, the White Paper does 

12 state, and I quote, "The dates and bounding 

13 levels of calculated potential exposures 

14 represent recorded operational history. 

15 However, thorium was present on site for most 

16 of its history. For unknown work locations and 

17 time periods of concern, dose reconstructors 

18 should assume that thoron exposure potential 

19 existed as a claimant-favorable assumption and 

20 assign thoron doses based on the guidance from 

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23

1 the table," which we just say on the previous 

2 slide. 

3 So I pretty much take that to mean, 

4 if you don't really know where the workers were, 

5 and as we know at Fernald it’s very difficult 

6 to place workers in specific locations, that 

7 the benefit of the doubt goes to the claimant 

8 and they would be assigned that thoron dose.

9 So, next we're going to look at that 

10 first period, 1979 to 1989, for which we're 

11 using the mobile in vivo data to construct a 

12 coworker model. And as you see in front of you, 

13 this is a completeness evaluation of that data 

14 set, which we actually performed a couple of 

15 years ago, but we should go over that here so 

16 it's fresh in everybody's mind. What we're 

17 looking at is the number of in vivo samples we 

18 had per year. As you can see, it's 1979 through 

19 1988, even though this period includes 1989. 

20 Essentially, 1989 was extrapolated based on the 

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24

1 previous data in the 1980s.

2 One interesting trend that you can 

3 look at here is that from '79 to about 1983 you 

4 have between 100 and 200 samples. And then in 

5 1984, it sort of spikes up over 300, then over 

6 400. This was interesting to me because that 

7 was a similar trend that we saw in the overall 

8 uranium bioassay program and it sort of 

9 coincided with the transition from National 

10 Lead over to Westinghouse.

11 One thing we looked at is how these 

12 in vivo data broke down by job title. And these 

13 job titles that you're looking at here are 

14 ranked by the total number of samples available 

15 in the data set. And as we can see, 55 percent 

16 of the actual in vivo samples that we have are 

17 associated with chemical operators, which 

18 certainly we would consider to be one of the 

19 higher risk job types. And if you look over at 

20 the actual magnitude of the results, at the 95th 

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25

1 percentile, the chemical operators also had the 

2 highest results. 

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: All right. Let me 

4 ask you a question here, because I was puzzled 

5 on this slide. I thought that these things 

6 should add up to 100 percent. What am I missing 

7 here? They're way over 100 percent.

8 MR. BARTON: How -- I apologize.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: The percent of the 

10 totals. I went through them yesterday.

11 MR. BARTON: I would assume it's an 

12 rounding error, but --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: The first two is 

14 80. We got 90 -- about 99 percent --

15 MR. BARTON: Are we looking at --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- with the first 

17 four. There's another 10 percent. It adds 

18 about to about 125 percent.

19 MR. BARTON: -- 91 percent. We'll 

20 have to go back and look at that. There must 

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26

1 be some sort of rounding error, but I'm not --

2 (Simultaneous speaking.)

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: It looks like more 

4 than a rounding error to me.

5 MR. BARTON: Okay. Well, I think 

6 the point is --

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Does something 

8 include something else there, like --

9 MR. STIVER: It might have been 

10 multiple job types.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: I mean, like are 

12 mill workers part of construction trades?

13 MR. STIVER: Yeah, it might be 

14 double-counted.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: I think there are 

16 probably some job categories --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, that's what I 

18 was --

19 MR. BARTON: We might have broken 

20 them out, you know, into industrial truck 

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27

1 operator and that somehow is still counted as

2 construction trade.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: That's what I sort 

4 of figured, but it wasn't clear to me why it 

5 was --

6 MR. BARTON: Yeah, and I can 

7 certainly get to the bottom of that during the 

8 break.

9 But I guess the point here is that 

10 we have a monitoring program that, when you look 

11 at the job types that were monitored most 

12 frequently, the chemical operators also had the 

13 highest results that we observed. And part of 

14 that is probably an artifact that the chemical 

15 operators would have been involved in the pilot 

16 plant operations, which was the final 

17 production operation for thorium. And it 

18 occurred in 1979. So you would expect that's 

19 where your exposure potential would be highest.

20 I guess what I'd take away from this 

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28

1 slide is that you don't have -- one of the things 

2 we always look for with completeness analysis 

3 is, does it look like there's a job that had high 

4 exposure potential but that was systematically 

5 excluded? That's one of the criteria that 

6 almost immediately calls a coworker model into

7 question. And I would argue based on what we 

8 see here that almost the opposite appears to be 

9 true, that the monitoring program was in fact 

10 sort of geared toward those higher risk job 

11 types. 

12 A big portion of this is the unknown 

13 sort of job titles, and that's either because 

14 the job title was just not included on the 

15 original bioassay card, it was blank or 

16 illegible. So that could be a wide spectrum. 

17 So just because that's high up on this list 

18 doesn't necessarily indicate that you're 

19 missing some of those job categories. You 

20 could have all sorts of different jobs in there, 

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29

1 a full spectrum. You could have ones that were 

2 exposed and ones that weren't exposed mixed 

3 together. So that's why perhaps the magnitude 

4 is not has high as you would expect.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Another question, 

6 Bob.

7 MR. BARTON: Yeah?

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: This is not directly 

9 on the slide, but it has bearing on it. Can you 

10 remind me, on thoron, which is another isotope 

11 of radon, is the working level month defined in 

12 an analogous way to radon-220? And if you 

13 don't have equilibrium, how is it defined, the 

14 working level month for thoron? Defined in 

15 terms of dose or --

16 MR. STIVER: No, it's in terms of 

17 potential alpha energy exposure.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

19 MR. STIVER: The main reason being 

20 because there is that disequilibrium and 

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30

1 that's --

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: But is the working 

3 level month for thoron the same amount of alpha 

4 energy as the working level month for radon? 

5 That's what I'm trying to get at. Or is it 

6 based on activity?

7 MR. ROLFES: This is Mark. One 

8 working level of thoron, I believe, is 7.1 

9 picocuries and 100 percent equilibrium. 

10 MR. HINNEFELD: To your question, 

11 yes.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, it assumes 

13 equilibrium, but if you don't have equilibrium, 

14 then you just go by total alpha energy? 

15 Because a lot of the times you don't have 

16 equilibrium. So if you're expressing working 

17 level months, are you just saying, okay, if we 

18 have the same amount of alpha energy for this 

19 ratio, it's still a working level month or --

20 MR. STIVER: Yeah, I think the 

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31

1 equilibrium ratio may be a little bit different 

2 for thoron than it would be by virtue it's a 

3 short decay time.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, different 

5 alphas and different --

6 MR. STIVER: Yeah.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, if I recall, 

9 working level month measurement is typically an 

10 alpha count, a particulate that was counted 

11 multiple times, at least two times.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. It didn't 

13 matter what the equilibrium was, you just --

14 MR. HINNEFELD: And what would 

15 happen was the extent of difference between the 

16 two alpha counts would give you some 

17 information about the equilibrium.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. You took 

19 them --

20 MR. HINNEFELD: And so there's an 

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32

1 adjustment for that.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: -- with a time 

3 lapse like you would for radon?

4 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: And then, as I 

7 recall, it's done the same way. And so you get 

8 some information. If you're taking actual 

9 working level month measurement, then you get 

10 information about the disequilibrium from the 

11 way you take the sample. If you're taking a 

12 radon measurement and saying, well, for this 

13 much radon we're going to use a 70 percent 

14 equilibrium or a 50 percent equilibrium, I 

15 don't know the answer to that one.

16 DR. LIPSZTEIN: May I --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Joyce will clear it 

18 up. 

19 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I think that when 

20 calculating that table, NIOSH on the White

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33

1 Paper assumes some equilibrium fraction.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Thank you, Joyce.

3 DR. LIPSZTEIN: When you go to 

4 Appendix F on the Paper you'll see that some 

5 equilibrium fractions were assumed. And 

6 actually this was, I think, one of the problems 

7 with the numbers that were found.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, and the 

9 reason the ratios between actinium and lead are 

10 so different in a couple cases is what, then?

11 MR. BARTON: Well, again, these 

12 aren't individual workers. These are sort of 

13 the 95th percentile of --

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's a 

15 distribution --

16 MR. BARTON: But we're also going 

17 to be talking about there's sort of a negative 

18 bias between the lead-212 -- and also there's 

19 some cases where there might be unsupported 

20 radium exposures, which would account for the 

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34

1 actinium being significantly higher than the 

2 lead-212 result, which won’t to be saying a lot, 

3 but we'll get into that. 

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. We'll get 

5 to that. But you highlighted a few here that --

6 MR. BARTON: These are highlight 

7 because they're the only results at the 95th 

8 percentile that are actually above the 

9 detection limit.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah.

11 MR. BARTON: So the detection limit 

12 for actinium was, I believe, .24 and for lead 

13 it was .23, or it might have been reversed.

14 Okay. So we also take a look at the 

15 areas to see where were the people sampled. 

16 Now, in this case, a large proportion were 

17 sampled in other areas, which is not surprising 

18 because you have several areas that wouldn't 

19 fit into Plant 1, 2, 3, 4, et cetera.

20 Interestingly, Plant 5 had 

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35

1 significantly high actinium results. And we 

2 kind of asked ourselves why that would be. 

3 There's no known processing of thorium 

4 throughout the campaign in Plant 5. But also 

5 one reason that might be is Building 65, where 

6 they stored a lot of the thorium in drums -- and 

7 it was actually noted in 1990 how much they were 

8 deteriorating and somewhat leaking -- that's 

9 right outside of Plant 5. It used to be called 

10 the old Plant 5 warehouse. So that might be an 

11 artifact of when they went to go get counted via 

12 in vivo and it's, you know, where were you? And 

13 it's like, well, I was in the old Plant 5 

14 warehouse. So they just scribbled down “Plant 

15 5.”

16 MR. HINNEFELD: This is Stu. Wait 

17 a minute. Building 65 was north of Plant 9, I 

18 think. 

19 MR. BARTON: It is referred to the 

20 old --

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36

1 MR. HINNEFELD: It is called the 

2 old Plant 5 warehouse on occasion, but 64 and 

3 65 were adjacent to each other. And there was 

4 Plant 5. North of that was Plant 9. And then 

5 north of that were Buildings 64 and 65.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: But Bob is 

7 suggesting that someone may have misidentified 

8 by calling it old Plant --

9 MR. HINNEFELD: They may have said 

10 they were working in the Plant 5 warehouse, I 

11 suppose.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Where they meant 

13 old --

14 MR. BARTON: Yeah, it's a theory, 

15 anyway. But also you see down here the pilot 

16 plant workers had really the highest overall 

17 results, which is not surprising because, as we 

18 said, the final campaign in 1979, which is what 

19 we're looking at here, happened in the pilot 

20 plant. It was a thoria gel operation. That 

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37

1 was really the last production activity. So, 

2 again, you would sort of expect to see in that 

3 last production activity the higher lung 

4 burdens.

5 This next sort of test that we put 

6 it to is we wanted to see how frequently workers 

7 with positive samples were re-sampled as 

8 opposed to the rest of the monitored working 

9 population. And what we see here in front of 

10 us is essentially we looked at it from three 

11 pretty simple metrics: arithmetic average, 

12 geometric mean and rank-ordered median. And 

13 what you can see here is these sort of bottom 

14 two rows are -- well, look at the middle row. 

15 If you submitted a positive sample, the average 

16 time to the next sample was about 100 days. So, 

17 you know, a little over three months. That's 

18 at the average. If you start looking at the 

19 mean and the median, it's much less than that. 

20 It's more like a month.

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38

1 Now, if your sample was less than 

2 the MDA, that number skyrockets to nearly 500 

3 at the average and pretty much close to a year 

4 at the geometric mean and median. So you're 

5 almost talking a factor of 10 for those two 

6 metrics. So it's pretty apparent, based on 

7 this analysis, that if you submitted a positive 

8 sample, you were put on that schedule to be 

9 counted again much faster. It wasn't just a 

10 set schedule where it didn't really matter what 

11 your result was. 

12 So, again, that's a piece of 

13 evidence for us that the data set we're looking 

14 at is sort of geared toward the higher exposed 

15 workers and, you know, it's not systematically 

16 excluding anybody. And really the ones with 

17 the higher results were re-sampled a lot 

18 quicker. So those are all pretty positive 

19 things for us.

20 Now we're going to go into the 

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39

1 adequacy of these thorium in vivo records. 

2 And, Joyce, step in if I get anything wrong 

3 here. I know you did most of the work on this 

4 particular section.

5 But the way we see it, there are four 

6 many facets in how you interpret the in vivo 

7 data. And when we say "adequacy," what we 

8 really mean is taking that number we see in the 

9 data set and relating it actually back to dose. 

10 And the four parts of that are really, number 

11 one, the assumption of the triple-separated 

12 thorium. And we can get into that if people 

13 have questions about that. 

14 Also, to your question, Dr. Ziemer, 

15 one of the things was adjusting the lead-212 

16 result for bias, because, as we saw, there's a 

17 significant difference in the Ac and Pb 

18 results, but also we noted that a lot of the lead 

19 results were negative, which just didn't make 

20 a lot of sense. So, basically what NIOSH did 

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40

1 was they went in and corrected that so that 

2 you're not seeing a whole bunch of negative 

3 results. We're actually sort of correcting 

4 them back to zero for background.

5 The third facet, we mentioned also 

6 the high actinium results in relation to the 

7 lead results, is this notion of unsupported 

8 radium exposure. And I apologize. You see 

9 these two bullet points below 4. Those should 

10 actually be underneath 3 because they pretty 

11 much describe how that's done. You use the 

12 actinium chest burden and you assign it as a 

13 radium intake. So you evaluate the actinium 

14 burden. Or if it's a missed dose, the MDA 

15 divided 2. And you use the radium biokinetic 

16 model, and it would be considered Type M.

17 Okay. The assumption of 

18 triple-separated thorium. This was actually 

19 discussed a few times in Work Group meetings. 

20 And back in our original review of the 

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41

1 completeness and adequacy of this 1979 to 1989 

2 data, we actually state, “SC&A agrees that the 

3 triple separation hypothesis -- that is, the 

4 ratio of thorium-228 to thorium-232 -- equals 

5 0.19. It's claimant favorably for the period 

6 1979 to 1988, and by extrapolation, to 1989 when 

7 the lead-212 results are used to calculate the 

8 dose.” And SC&A's position remains unchanged 

9 on that particular topic. 

10 In a similar fashion, as I said, we 

11 noticed that there were too many negative 

12 lead-212 results when we were looking at the 

13 data set, and we expressed concern in that 2012 

14 report and we state, “most of the thorium-232 

15 progeny results above the MDA are for actinium, 

16 and in most cases actinium activities are 

17 higher than the lead-212 activities.”

18 Subsequent to that report, NIOSH 

19 calculated an adjustment for that observed 

20 bias. It's contained in their most recent 

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42

1 White Paper. And SC&A agrees with the 

2 adjustments and how they were calculated. So 

3 we have no problem with that. 

4 Now we move on to unsupported 

5 radium. SC&A agrees with this method as well, 

6 to use the actinium results to calculate 

7 radium-228. And these are sort of the samples 

8 we saw on the previous page. But to evaluate 

9 the actinium chest burden, or if it's a positive 

10 chest burden or as a missed dose, the MDA 

11 divided by two. And you assign it as the 

12 radium-228.

13 One thing we did note is that this 

14 method is really for estimating unsupported 

15 radium exposures to monitored workers. What 

16 we didn't see is any method to possibly 

17 incorporate that into coworker doses. And we 

18 don't know if that's something DCAS was 

19 planning to do, or I don't know if there's a 

20 particular response. We can certainly wait 

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43

1 for a formal review of the Paper.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, see, now 

3 we're talking about the period from '79 to '89.

4 MR. BARTON: Right.

5 MR. HINNEFELD: Right? And I 

6 think that while we have prepared methods for 

7 unmonitored workers, I think there's going to 

8 be a really small population of unmonitored 

9 workers that didn't get any in vivo monitoring 

10 during their employment and were in a category 

11 where they were likely to be exposed. Because 

12 people -- you know, if they were monitoring --

13 if the in vivo monitor was used to monitor 

14 people for potential exposure for uranium, that 

15 was what the purpose was, for uranium. 

16 It showed up usually a couple times 

17 a year. And they counted everybody who'd had 

18 a detectable burden, and so you have the 

19 frequent recalculation if they had a detectable 

20 burden. The operations people had a 

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44

1 particular frequency. The maintenance people 

2 had another frequency. And then other people 

3 who might go in the process area, like health 

4 and safety people, they probably had -- I don't 

5 remember exactly, but it may have been a little 

6 less frequent. 

7 But almost everybody in the 

8 potentially exposed population would have been 

9 monitored. So I think there are very few 

10 people who were potentially exposed who didn't 

11 have an in vivo monitoring. Maybe some 

12 claustrophobes or something. Because in vivo, 

13 the chamber was really small, the portable 

14 counter

15 MR. BARTON: We did notice “refused 

16 to get counted” in a lot of files. 

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah. So you're 

18 only going to have a handful of people probably 

19 who were potentially exposed who weren’t 

20 monitored. And looking at the data, the in 

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45

1 vivo data, the radium-228 without associated 

2 lead-212 is a fairly uncommon event. So, given 

3 the uncommon nature of the in vivo outcome and 

4 the small population that's probably going to 

5 need to the unmonitored approach, the 

6 unmonitored worker approach, we did not propose 

7 that we would add the unsupported radium-228 

8 intake for the unmonitored people. We just 

9 felt like it would be unlikely those two 

10 unlikely events would converge. We can --

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: But if you had such 

12 a case what would you do?

13 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, we wouldn't 

14 know.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: We wouldn't have an 

17 in vivo result, so we wouldn't see the high --

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, you wouldn't? 

19 Okay.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: -- the 212 and 228.

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46

1 MR. BARTON: Joyce --

2 DR. LIPSZTEIN: May I ask you --

3 MR. BARTON: Go ahead, Joyce.

4 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I would like to ask 

5 one question. Did they understand well that 

6 you were going to use all the actinium-228 chest 

7 burden to use it as unsupported radium?

8 MR. HINNEFELD: No, I thought what 

9 the decision process was -- and I may be wrong 

10 on this, so maybe somebody on the phone might 

11 have to correct me -- but I thought what the 

12 decision process was, was that there had to be 

13 a particular difference, some threshold 

14 difference between the actinium-228 and the 

15 lead-212 in order to draw that conclusion. I 

16 don't remember what it was. And I know Tom 

17 LaBone is on the phone and I may have just 

18 completely bollocksed that up. Tom would be 

19 probably the one who knows better than I.

20 MR. LABONE: I don't know if that 

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47

1 exists in the procedure or not, the actual 

2 instructions to do that.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I'm sorry, Tom, I 

4 didn't --

5 MR. KATZ: Tom said he didn't know 

6 whether that exists in the procedures to do 

7 that.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So, in 

9 other words, we may not have actually prepared 

10 that.

11 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Because that's on 

12 the Paper. And I thought, wow, that's -- but 

13 it's there, how to calculate the dose. And 

14 it's there in the procedures, evaluate the 

15 actinium-228 chest burden with radium-228 by 

16 arithmetic model and assign it as an intake rate 

17 of Type-M radium-228. It doesn't say anything 

18 about the difference between actinium and lead, 

19 or nothing like that. It’s just evaluate 

20 actinium-228.

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48

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I think that 

2 what we've prepared isn't what I would call a 

3 procedure, but rather this is the method that 

4 would be utilized in the instance where it's 

5 determined it's necessary. And based on what 

6 Tom said, I don't know we've actually set a 

7 criteria for when is it significantly 

8 different. When you look at the in vivo data, 

9 there are examples, or at least one example of 

10 a case where there is an actinium result that's 

11 quite a lot higher than the lead-212 result. 

12 DR. LIPSZTEIN: No, that's exactly 

13 what my doubt is, because it doesn't say when 

14 there is a significant difference. It just say 

15 all actinium-228.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: I think what the 

17 intent was not to -- you know, what we prepared 

18 was not intended to be this is a definitive 

19 instruction that in every case we will do that, 

20 but I think that what we would expect to do is 

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49

1 to come up with some sort of criteria. When is 

2 the difference between actinium and lead big 

3 enough that we feel like it's worth that, you 

4 know, doing the unsupported radium intake? 

5 Most of these in vivo counts, if they're 

6 detectable, they're close to the detection 

7 level. And so you're going to have a pretty 

8 sizeable level of uncertainty in terms of the 

9 result. And so you're going to have a fair 

10 amount of separation, I would think, between 

11 those two numbers before you would really 

12 conclude that you an unsupported radium intake. 

13 So, to answer your question, Joyce, 

14 I don't think that we've actually developed 

15 criteria for when we would make that decision.

16 DR. LIPSZTEIN: No, I agree with 

17 you that you should analyze the actinium-228. 

18 That makes sense when it's significantly 

19 greater than the lead. But if you read what is 

20 written on the page 13, you'll see that it's 

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50

1 written that you are actually evaluating all 

2 actinium-228 chest burden.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I think when 

4 we write the procedure for how to do the dose 

5 reconstruction we'll make it clear that there's 

6 some sort of criteria to select that would cause 

7 you to do that, some sort of selection criteria 

8 that would cause you to do that. 

9 MR. BARTON: Yeah, I think we're 

10 just confused a little bit by the wording, 

11 because it almost looked like we were doubling 

12 up. You know, we used the actinium here and the 

13 lead to do the thorium. So, I mean, obviously 

14 that's very claimant-favorable do that, but not 

15 very realistic. 

16 All right. To move onto No. 4 -- I 

17 don't want to spend too much time on this -- is 

18 how you calculate what's known as the OPOS 

19 statistic: one person one sample. For those of 

20 you who don't know what that is, is what we used 

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51

1 to do is called the pooled approach, which is 

2 take every sample, fit it to a curve, pick off 

3 the 50th and 95th and calculate intakes. One 

4 person one sample is we take each worker's 

5 samples in a given period, say a year. You 

6 average those into one data point and now you 

7 have a distribution of workers instead of a 

8 distribution of all the samples. 

9 And this is being currently thrown around 

10 in the SEC Issues Work Group. And aside from 

11 just averaging, it's being proposed whether you 

12 actually weight it by some sort time, either the 

13 time that happened before that sample or the 

14 time after that sample to the next sample. 

15 Those are known as post-weighting and 

16 pre-weighting. We just wanted to note here 

17 that currently NIOSH is using the 

18 post-weighting approach. SC&A is 

19 recommending the pre-weighted approach. So 

20 that might be something that may be changed down 

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52

1 the line. It may not. We wanted to make sure 

2 the Work Group was aware of that and how you 

3 actually calculate the results.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: I thought the SEC 

5 Work Group agreed on a weighting procedure.

6 MR. KATZ: They did.

7 MR. STIVER: Yeah, this is Stiver. 

8 Dr. Ziemer is correct. In the last SEC Work 

9 Group meeting, I believe Dr. Neton indicated 

10 that they wanted to go ahead and use the 

11 pre-weighting. So it's something that's been 

12 agreed to. It just hasn't been promulgated 

13 into a procedure yet.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: I think this was 

15 prepared before that decision was made and so --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Basically it's in 

17 abeyance with the SEC Work Group. So it has 

18 been agreed upon.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: I believe it has 

20 been, so I think the model will be adjusted.

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53

1 MR. BARTON: I mean, at the time 

2 this was done --

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, I 

4 understand.

5 MR. BARTON: -- post-weighting was 

6 actually in RPRT-53, the revision. 

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

8 MR. BARTON: So that might change. 

9 So the numbers probably will change. So I just 

10 wanted to make the Work Group aware of that.

11 Okay. Now we're going to talk a 

12 little bit about the job types that were 

13 identified as thorium workers. And, again, 

14 this is from page 16 of the NIOSH White Paper, 

15 and it provides this short list of seven job 

16 types. I've already read them into the record. 

17 They're up here on the slide, so I won't bother 

18 to do that again. 

19 But to sort of get a handle on this, 

20 SC&A took a look at some claimant files. When 

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54

1 I say "claimant files," I mean the CATI reports, 

2 which is the Computer-Aided Telephone 

3 Interview; DOE response files, which are the 

4 monitoring files provided by DOE; and the 

5 Department of Labor case files, which don't 

6 usually provide too much more information than 

7 you'd find in the CATI and the DOE response, but 

8 since it's pretty much the initial application, 

9 sometimes there's more information about what 

10 sort of job duties were done. And so there is 

11 valuable information there.

12 We only looked at claims with a PoC 

13 less than 50 percent, because obviously those 

14 are the claims that would ultimately benefit 

15 from a coworker model or coworker intakes 

16 assigned. And what we basically did is we took 

17 that group and we classified them into 

18 essentially four categories: Category 1 is not 

19 likely to be assigned coworker intakes. These 

20 are your administrative personnel. You know, 

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55

1 secretaries, people who really didn't enter 

2 radiological areas and so it's probably not 

3 appropriate to assign thorium exposure 

4 potential to them.

5 Category 2 is essentially those 

6 workers, those seven job types that were 

7 identified in the NIOSH White Paper as thorium 

8 workers. So if they're unmonitored, they're 

9 getting the thorium coworker model. 

10 And these next two categories are 

11 kind of ones of interest to us. Unknown 

12 essentially refers to either there is no job 

13 title included in the claimant file, which 

14 sometimes CATI interviews are declined or 

15 performed with, say, a survivor who wasn't 

16 really sure on the exact duties and job title. 

17 Then you sort of have this gray area 

18 in category 4 where it's sort of ambiguous. 

19 You know, you don't fit into that 

20 administrative category, but you don't quite 

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56

1 fit into those seven categories delineated in 

2 the NIOSH White Paper.

3 So, on this slide we have 

4 essentially the number of claims that fell into 

5 each of these categories. As we can see, about 

6 a quarter of those claims would be considered 

7 purely administrative. A little over 28 

8 percent fit into that -- it says likely, but 

9 really based on the current proposed method 

10 would definitely be assigned coworker intakes. 

11 Unknown was a pretty small grouping. Only six, 

12 six-and-a-half percent. And potentially 

13 those are the ones we're really interested in. 

14 We're kind of interested in some of the 

15 unknowns, too, but it's really tough. A lot of 

16 times we glean information about whether they 

17 had thorium exposure potential, because when 

18 you have an unknown, what they did, you really 

19 don't have the information of what types of jobs 

20 they would have been doing. So it 

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57

1 says here we concentrated on the third and 

2 fourth, but really what we're talking about is 

3 that fourth category of the short of gray area. 

4 They're not on the list of thorium workers as 

5 defined by the White Paper. They're not 

6 obviously non-radiological workers. 

7 So we examined 20 such claims that 

8 fell into categories 3 and 4. Really there 

9 were only a couple from category 3. They were 

10 mostly from category 4.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: How did you select 

12 the 20 once you got the categories? 

13 MR. BARTON: Well, what I wanted to 

14 do was get a good cross-section of different job 

15 types that kind of fell into that gray area, but 

16 also have a significant employment period in 

17 the '79 to '89 period.

18 So we have a couple of observations 

19 based on that review. The job categories that 

20 fell into that sort of gray area were engineers, 

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58

1 fire protection technicians, analytical 

2 chemists, supervisors; and were they 

3 supervisors in an office setting or were they 

4 labor foremen, that type of thing? Inventory 

5 control. I mean, do we have people out there 

6 opening barrels? Clerks usually we would 

7 consider administrative, but in this case the 

8 person was really out there with a clipboard 

9 kind of just like the inventory control person. 

10 Laundry we were kind of interested in in case 

11 they'd be exposed to thorium-type materials, 

12 washing maybe some of the anti-Cs or something 

13 like that. So we took at least one laundry 

14 worker. And then various types of trade 

15 workers that didn't necessarily fit into those 

16 seven categories that are in the proposed 

17 approach.

18 So, 13 of those 20 surveyed claims 

19 indicated exposure potential to thorium in the 

20 CATI report. Now I want to sort of give a 

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59

1 little description there, because it's not 

2 necessarily that they said, “I was working in 

3 the thorium area,” or something like that. 

4 What it essentially is, and it's on the second 

5 or third page of every CATI report, it's a 

6 listing of maybe 25 to 30 contaminants and check 

7 boxes. Yes, no, don't know. What form was it 

8 in? What type of quantity? And so when I say 

9 13 of the 20, 13 of the 20 had checked thorium 

10 for potential for exposure.

11 One other observation, because 

12 several of these workers did work after the time 

13 when the mobile in vivo unit was no longer used,

14 was that when the IVEC system, which was the in 

15 vivo counter that was directly at Fernald -- it 

16 didn't move around or anything -- they were 

17 monitored after 1988 in that system, but they 

18 were not monitored or were rather sporadically 

19 monitored proper to that time. 

20 And what I would take away from that 

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60

1 is, assuming they were pretty much doing the 

2 same types of things, that maybe after 1988, as 

3 the program is really fine tuning itself, they 

4 realized, well, maybe these people should have 

5 been monitored, so we're going to monitor them 

6 now, but maybe they weren't monitored before.

7 Another observation we had that 10 

8 of the 20 claimants indicated that their work 

9 locations were highly variable. And I have 

10 quoted here, "worked all over the site." 

11 That's actually a really common phrase that 

12 you'll see stated in claimant interviews.

13 And six of the 20 actually 

14 specifically indicated either direct work with 

15 thorium or worked in thorium areas, such as 

16 Buildings 64 and 65, or involved in the thorium 

17 overpack, or a lot of times the quote, "thorium 

18 warehouse," which could probably refer to a 

19 couple different places.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: It probably 

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61

1 referred to Plant 1. 

2 I would just like to offer a couple 

3 things here. First, we listed seven 

4 categories of unmonitored people who would get 

5 the coworker approach, which was a way to 

6 describe the kinds of people we expect would be 

7 there. And at this point, we're not writing 

8 exclusive procedures, you know, do this and do 

9 that. This is --

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Non-restrictive.

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah. So I think 

12 some of these categories; fire protection, 

13 assuming that's the fire protection engineer or 

14 fire and safety inspector; technicians; 

15 supervisors; probably inventory control, would 

16 probably be people we would consider 

17 potentially exposed in this situation.

18 Another thing to remember, though, 

19 is that during this period the thorium was 

20 stored and that the potential for the exposure 

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62

1 for uncontained thorium was intermittent and 

2 relatively small scale. They had a small scale 

3 packaging operation. So things like if it’s a 

4 trades worker who worked for a construction --

5 we're talking about construction trades, not a 

6 maintenance trade, because sometimes the same 

7 job title shows up in your maintenance 

8 organization and in your construction 

9 organization. 

10 I don't think there would be a

11 construction exposure to any of these 

12 re-packing operations. Once you get into the 

13 subcontract remediation activities, there 

14 might be -- those who are subcontracted, they 

15 might have construction characters in them, or 

16 construction trades people. But I think it 

17 would only be maintenance trades that would be 

18 exposed to the overpacking situation.

19 Probably the real reason my people 

20 who hadn't been monitored previously or 

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63

1 sporadically monitored in vivo previously 

2 started being monitored with the IVEC counter 

3 is because you went from having maybe 12 weeks 

4 of availability a year to 52 weeks of 

5 availability. 

6 The mobile counter would show up for 

7 maybe six weeks at a time, 12 times a week. I 

8 think it was about six weeks. And they would 

9 count. And the poor guys who ran the in vivo 

10 counter worked long shifts because usually 

11 there were three shifts of people and they would 

12 count people all the time and just get as many 

13 people through as you could. And once you had 

14 an in vivo counting staff and an in vivo 

15 counting facility, and you got 52 weeks of 

16 availability, then you would count people who 

17 maybe didn't the cut, or didn't make the cut 

18 very often previously.

19 MR. BARTON: Okay. Well, I mean, 

20 one of our main concerns here, I guess, from 

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64

1 sort of a macro view is that when you create 

2 lists of job types to consider for a coworker 

3 modeling sort of -- I guess sort of putting the 

4 onus on the dose reconstructor to determine 

5 whether they fit one of those job categories --

6 and I think there's more a chance that you could 

7 possibly miss someone when you put an actual 

8 list of specific jobs to who you're going to 

9 assign a coworker intake. 

10 And I think really maybe the better 

11 way to do it is to put really the onus on 

12 ourselves, the program, to either say, listen, 

13 there are reasons why and very specific reasons 

14 why we believe that this claimant could not have 

15 been exposed to thorium. 

16 And if we don't have that evidence 

17 to say, you know, absolutely not, there's no 

18 exposure potential for this particular worker, 

19 then I think you really have to give them the 

20 benefit of the doubt. And I think that's the 

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65

1 spirit of what we're really trying to show here, 

2 is that you do have the sort of gray area job 

3 titles. And I'm not saying we should expand 

4 the list of job titles. What I'm saying is, I 

5 think philosophically we should be coming from 

6 the other angle of not trying to figure out 

7 who's included. But really, if we can't prove 

8 they should be excluded, then I think they 

9 should be assigned coworker intake.

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don't 

11 disagree with the thought of that, and I think 

12 we might be able to prepare something. I think 

13 you could write your actual procedures, which 

14 we haven't written yet, to tell the dose 

15 reconstructor that if you're not going to 

16 assign a coworker dose, you need to explain in 

17 the dose reconstruction why coworker wasn't 

18 assigned, you know, because the person was a 

19 secretary, the president of the company's 

20 secretary. So we didn't assign coworker dose.

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66

1 MR. BARTON: No, I agree.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, we could 

3 probably do something like that. 

4 Now, it's interesting, you work in 

5 the program long enough and you hear 

6 everything. Brad, you know that. You hear 

7 every side of every question. We are often 

8 criticized for not including lists and not 

9 being specific. And we are also criticized 

10 when we generate lists because you omit people, 

11 and what about these other things? 

12 And so I think what we tried to 

13 arrive at is a system of, well, here are some 

14 things that -- we generally write lists and say 

15 you definitely want to do it here. I can 

16 understand your point. Maybe you make the dose 

17 reconstructor write why they're going to 

18 exclude it.

19 MR. BARTON: Right.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: So I think that 

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67

1 will be something for the procedure thing, but 

2 I don't disagree with the sentiment. I just 

3 think that during this period though --

4 remember, this is a repackaging period, a 

5 storage and occasional repackaging 

6 period --and I think you would make different 

7 judgments about thorium exposure if you were 

8 really thinking of -- you are probably able, if 

9 you want to go to the problem, of making 

10 different judgments about thorium exposure 

11 than you would make about uranium exposure 

12 during this period, because uranium production 

13 was going on all over the place up through '86, 

14 something like that. 

15 So you would make different 

16 judgments about uranium exposure. But at 

17 least you could make different judgments if you 

18 wanted to go the effort. So there might be 

19 reasons to exclude someone from thorium 

20 exposure during this period that would not be 

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68

1 a reason to exclude someone from uranium 

2 exposure. I just want us all to keep in mind, 

3 that what was the status of the thorium out 

4 there in the period we're talking about?

5 MR. BARTON: Sure, and I guess I 

6 would add on to that. It's sort of are we 

7 trying to create a list of who's included or are 

8 we trying to create a philosophy of who will be 

9 excluded?

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah.

11 MR. BARTON: And I don’t think it's 

12 really proper to really delineate specific job 

13 titles. I mean, you look at probably the 

14 claimant lists for any site and you might have 

15 1,000 workers. You might have 300 different 

16 job titles. So creating long lists to be 

17 completely prescriptive is just not 

18 reasonable, which is why I feel like coming from 

19 the other direction to say, we sort of have to 

20 prove ourselves that there's no chance that 

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69

1 thorium exposure happened in order to not 

2 include someone in an unmonitored dose. 

3 And as you say, these operations for 

4 thorium are much different than uranium. So, 

5 I would say then it's easier to make a case for 

6 excluding someone. But, again, I would come at 

7 it not as we'll decide who to include, but 

8 really you have to prove why you're going to 

9 exclude them, which is essentially what you 

10 said.

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I think 

12 that's decent. I'm just kind of curious about 

13 analytical chemists. I would probably exclude 

14 analytical chemists for thorium exposure. I 

15 wouldn't exclude them from uranium exposure.

16 MR. BARTON: Yeah, well, I mean, 

17 again is that someone out there sampling the 

18 drums, or is that someone sitting in a lab? 

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Analytical 

20 chemists, as far as I know, either worked in the 

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70

1 analytic laboratory in the health safety 

2 laboratory. And so I don't think there was any 

3 sampling done during this repackaging --

4 MR. BARTON: But, again, what I 

5 don't want to do is add a list of workers.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Right.

7 MR. BARTON: I don't want to have a 

8 list of jobs.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah. Here is my 

10 reason for not including this person. 

11 MR. BARTON: Right. And you could 

12 have a situation where they're an analytical 

13 chemist because perhaps their survivor said 

14 they were an analytical chemist, but really 

15 they were out there sampling or something like 

16 that. But, again, it's making the case of why 

17 you would not assign coworker doses versus 

18 making the case for why you should.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: This question 

20 though is broader than Fernald. It's come up 

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71

1 a number of times in the Procedures Work Group. 

2 And I certainly agree with SC&A's concern that 

3 you don't want it to boil down to a subjective 

4 judgment on the part of a single dose 

5 reconstructor. You want some consistency 

6 across the board so that if five different dose 

7 reconstructors had the same case they would 

8 arrive at the same conclusion.

9 There are a lot of situations where 

10 it has been helpful to provide a list as an 

11 example of the types of jobs, but have the 

12 caveat, which is your caveat, that unless you 

13 can exclude somebody specifically from a broad 

14 category, then they're in. So you end up doing 

15 both, because if you completely eliminate the 

16 descriptors which are some of those job 

17 descriptions, then you could argue that you 

18 have interview subjectivity too in the use of 

19 the philosophy.

20 MR. BARTON: Sure.

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72

1 MEMBER ZIEMER: How do you get away 

2 from the subjectivity? So, it's a difficult 

3 issue to cover it both ways. I know we just 

4 discussed it about a week ago in the Procedures 

5 Work Group where SC&A again raised this in 

6 another context, and I think it's a good point. 

7 We need to be able to assure the consistency of 

8 the decision so it doesn't really look 

9 subjective.

10 MR. BARTON: Sure. You're always 

11 going to have situations, like you said, five 

12 different dose reconstructors. They could 

13 look at the same case and, even the way I'm 

14 saying it, three of them make a case for why they 

15 shouldn't be included and two of them say, well, 

16 no, there's a little bit there that we should 

17 include. So I understand there --

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, we sort of, I 

19 think, at the Procedures Group kind of reached 

20 the point of saying let's give some examples. 

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73

1 We know these are always in, but you can't --

2 this is not the exclusive list. And you add to 

3 it basically what you described. Something 

4 like that.

5 MR. KATZ: You're still going to 

6 look at the claims file and see what information 

7 is in there, which can modify what you do in a 

8 given case.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: And you're 

10 probably not going to 100 percent eliminate the 

11 subjectivity of different dose reconstructors, 

12 but you certainly want to minimize it.

13 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, and then I 

14 guess I kind of look at it a little bit 

15 differently being on the Dose Reconstruction 

16 Group, because then we get into it and we're 

17 seeing somebody excluded from it and we have no 

18 explanation why we get into it. And what Stu 

19 hit on that I really liked was that then, if 

20 somebody is excluded from this, that the dose 

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74

1 reconstructor gives a little caveat of why 

2 there's --

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, that's what 

4 Bob is saying.

5 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: You've got to 

7 justify it.

8 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: You've got to 

9 justify it. And I really like that, because 

10 looking at it from our standpoint on that, that 

11 gives us a better understanding of the thought 

12 process and also the reasoning behind it. 

13 Because as you were going through all these, I 

14 was looking at the clerks, and the laundry one 

15 is the one that really stuck out to me, because, 

16 to me, that is the focal point of everything 

17 that goes on throughout the whole site. All 

18 the coveralls ended up right there, you know, 

19 and different protective clothing and stuff 

20 that they have. Geez, that's where everything 

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75

1 throughout the site, to me, would end up. And 

2 I think that's one of the reasons why this 

3 started in the issues because most people 

4 showed up for uranium who weren't supposed to 

5 be. 

6 So I agree wholeheartedly with you. 

7 And every site is going to be different, because 

8 we even actually brought up certain sites that 

9 the person's job was the same for 20 years, but 

10 their job title changed four times. So I agree 

11 with what you're saying. We just don't know 

12 how to get there.

13 MR. BARTON: Right. Well, I think 

14 it's like Dr. Ziemer said, you can add some job 

15 titles as illustrative examples as long as the 

16 caveat is if you're not going to assign the 

17 coworker dose, then there has to be ample 

18 justification for why that's not happening. 

19 And that is really one of the, I guess, 

20 overarching issues that we wanted to bring up 

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76

1 today. 

2 I believe we can move on to the 1990 

3 to 1994 period. Monitored worker doses in this 

4 period are going to be based on their in vivo 

5 results. And as we said at the outset, the 

6 unmonitored workers are assigned on based 10 

7 percent of the Class W, which is sort of the 

8 middle ground. It stands for weeks. It's 

9 sort of like Type M thorium DAC value. And 

10 again, as I noted, it was a little confusing in 

11 the White Paper because it said in one place 

12 that you had to submit that pre-job fecal sample 

13 to really be considered for the coworker 

14 intakes based on this DAC value. 

15 But, curiously, there were dose 

16 reconstruction examples. And it's in the last 

17 three pages of that White Paper. It was 

18 example 3, which was essentially a made-up 

19 worker who worked 1990 to 1994 who had no in vivo 

20 monitoring data and was assigned a DAC value, 

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77

1 but there was no indication, at least in the 

2 example, that a fecal sample was performed. So 

3 we were a little confused as to whether that was 

4 a stringent guideline. It goes back to the 

5 sort of worker assignments that we were talking 

6 about in the earlier period where you have some 

7 illustrative example jobs and then you sort of 

8 have to justify why they weren't being included 

9 in the coworker assignment.

10 Another thing about this that we 

11 noticed is we're using the Class W DAC value, 

12 whereas the Class Y is about a factor of two 

13 higher. And I guess we didn't understand why 

14 that choice was made. We feel like 

15 consideration should be given to the higher DAC 

16 value in calculating those coworker intakes. 

17 In fact, it actually says one place in the 

18 report, and it's quoted from the 1990 Technical 

19 Basis Manual for Fernald -- it says, "ICRP 

20 30" -- and, again, this is from 1990 -- "ICRP 

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78

1 30 has assigned oxides and hydroxides of 

2 thorium to inhalation Class Y. All compounds 

3 at the FMPC are assigned to inhalation Class Y."

4 So I guess what we're saying is 

5 that, barring a sufficient case of why you 

6 wouldn't see that solubility class, we feel you 

7 should go with the bounding value. I don't 

8 know if there are any specific comments on that 

9 at this point.

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don't 

11 recall. I don't know if anybody on the phone 

12 is prepared to talk about it or not. From a 

13 control setup, if you're working with thorium 

14 and you're not real confident of the solubility 

15 class you're going to encounter, or you're 

16 going to encounter a mixture of solubility 

17 classes, as you set up your controls you would 

18 use the lower DAC. Because you'd set up your 

19 airborne contamination area at 10 percent of 

20 DAC, and you would use the lower DAC if you had 

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79

1 questions about the solubility of the material. 

2 So it kind of depends on the evidence available. 

3 Is that what was done and is that why we chose 

4 the lower DAC for this 10 percent intake?

5 So, now, I assume that once we 

6 arrive at whatever intake it's going to be, 

7 we'll use our normal method of saying the actual 

8 solubility we're going to use in the dose 

9 reconstruction is going to depend on the organ 

10 because one solubility class would be more 

11 favorable for some organs and another class 

12 would be more favorable for other organs. So 

13 I assume we're going to do that kind of standard 

14 practice. So the question though --

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: If it's lung, we'll 

16 use the --

17 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, yeah.

18 MR. BARTON: But that's after 

19 you've arrived at --

20 MR. HINNEFELD: But that's after 

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80

1 you've arrived at the intake. Exactly. 

2 So I understand what you're saying, but I think 

3 it has to do with do we have sufficient evidence 

4 that the control levels were set at 10 percent 

5 of the Class W data, of the lower data? In 

6 which case people wouldn't be exposed over that 

7 amount. 

8 See, this is getting into 1990 now, 

9 so we're getting into fairly recent history. 

10 Westinghouse had been there for a number of 

11 years. They were still there in 1990, yeah. 

12 Westinghouse had been there for a while and had 

13 been in place and things were much better 

14 controlled than they had been. And so 

15 I'm thinking there may be sufficient indication 

16 that these work areas, these thorium work areas 

17 were controlled sufficiently so that people 

18 didn't go into these -- the areas were roped 

19 off. People didn't go in unless they were 

20 probably monitored and certainly wearing 

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81

1 respiratory protection. 

2 So I think we just have to see what 

3 the strength of the evidence is. If there's 

4 not strong evidence they used the lower DAC, 

5 then, sure, I understand what you're saying.

6 MR. BARTON: There was, I know, a 

7 couple of references to the Class W, and when 

8 we sort of traced them down, it was related to 

9 projects that were kind of started in 1995, as 

10 far as we could tell. 

11 And then also sort of anecdotally, 

12 when we get to the breathing zone results, which 

13 we'll discuss a little bit later, you do see 

14 both solubility classes. It's mostly Class W, 

15 but there are some under Class Y. And when you 

16 get into that methodology, you'll evaluate that 

17 breathing zone based on what's listed there. 

18 And then as NIOSH does, they assign it based on 

19 whatever is higher for the organ. 

20 So I guess we just wanted to see sort 

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82

1 of the case made of why the lower value was used 

2 when it does have a factor of two difference in 

3 the calculated intake at the end of the day. 

4 Another thing we noticed is that 

5 when we were looking at claimant files is there 

6 were a lot of workers that suddenly started 

7 being monitored, and that could be for the 

8 reasons you stated, because now you have a 

9 permanent facility onsite. 

10 But, again, we wanted to take a look 

11 at some claimants during this period. And, 

12 again, we have sort of two criteria. Less than 

13 50 percent POC. And also we kind of added in 

14 this caveat that you had to work in this period 

15 for at least three months, because we didn't 

16 want to be looking at workers who were there for 

17 a month and, you know, you don't see monitoring. 

18 So that doesn't really tell you anything. 

19 So about 252 claimants fit into 

20 those two criteria. Based on that review, 75 

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83

1 percent of the claimants we looked at had in 

2 vivo counts during that 1990 to 1994 period. 

3 So that leaves 67 claimants who weren't 

4 monitored in that period. So we looked at that 

5 67. Forty-five could be considered in those 

6 job titles with very little exposure 

7 potentially, if any. Again, you have the clerk 

8 here, but in this case it was a clerk that was 

9 an office clerk, essentially. Secretary, 

10 contract administrator, HR representative. 

11 I don't want to necessarily read all of these 

12 in, but you can see them on the slide there. 

13 Very little chance that they would have been 

14 exposed to these. 

15 So, now you're down to about 22 

16 workers. And so these are the one we looked at 

17 in-depth. And the job titles we see there are 

18 laborers, maintenance, painters, iron workers, 

19 heavy equipment operators, a technologist, 

20 which we weren't really sure exactly how they 

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84

1 might be -- they might out there working on 

2 instrumentation or something like that. 

3 Quality assurance. Again, were they out there 

4 sampling drums? Health physicists, 

5 obviously, would have been part of that 

6 process, or potentially part of that process. 

7 And engineers again. So those are the types of 

8 job titles we saw out of the 22 we looked at 

9 in-depth. 

10 Again, nine out of those 22 worked 

11 all over the site, or, you know, all plants and 

12 buildings is often what you hear. But also 11 

13 of the 22 actually indicated in their CATI 

14 report that their exposure in any sort of 

15 radiological area was either intermittent or 

16 non-existent. 

17 As a follow-on to that, when you 

18 look at their external badging, which was 

19 pretty much required to enter a radiological 

20 area, again, you have a couple of months during 

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85

1 that five-year span where there was a badge or 

2 two and then whole periods where there was 

3 nothing. They were probably not in areas where 

4 exposure potential could have existed for very 

5 long.

6 One claimant actually indicated 

7 involvement in the overpacking, however, based 

8 on examination of that claim, it probably 

9 occurred after 1994. So, even though that 

10 person was not monitored in the 1990 to 1994 

11 period, when we examined it, it appeared that 

12 that overpacking occurred after 1994. And in 

13 fact, we'll talk about it a little bit later. 

14 There was extensive breathing zone for thorium 

15 over the exact span that was indicated in the 

16 CATI report for the overpacking operation.

17 So, to continue on, like we said, 

18 the coworker intakes were based on 10 percent 

19 of the DAC value to be applied to workers who 

20 submitted thorium fecal samples. What we 

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86

1 concluded based on the claimant study, it's 

2 pretty unlikely that the unmonitored workers, 

3 the workers who didn't actually have in vivo 

4 results which you'd use to reconstruct doses, 

5 would have actually been in an environment, 10 

6 percent of that derived air concentration, for 

7 the entire duration of the relevant employment. 

8 So we feel that that 10 percent 

9 reasonably represents a bounding approach to 

10 the workers. But also, based on those 

11 unmonitored claimants, we do see a few 

12 situations where there is opportunity to 

13 potentially be exposed to thorium. And so we 

14 sort of questioned that criteria that you had 

15 to submit a pre-employment fecal sample.

16 And one of the things that was 

17 referenced, I believe, where this sort of came 

18 from was a standard operating procedure, but 

19 that's the same one that required workers who 

20 were, "routinely handling thorium materials 

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87

1 submit a fecal sample." It also required that 

2 they were in vivo counted at the beginning of 

3 the operation, at the end of the operation and 

4 at three-month intervals.

5 So that sort of begs the question, 

6 why would you have somebody unmonitored via the 

7 in vivo system and not have their fecal sample? 

8 Two possible explanations is that their in vivo 

9 records were maybe lost or unavailable, in 

10 which case the same might be said about the 

11 fecal samples. Maybe you have workers who 

12 their fecal sample was lost. So that's kind of 

13 neither here nor there. Or maybe that 

14 operating procedure just wasn't followed as 

15 stringently or only followed for workers who 

16 are routinely handling thorium, in which case 

17 10 percent of the DAC might not necessarily be 

18 appropriate.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. Run me back 

20 through this again. I think I lost the train 

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88

1 there a little bit. The operating procedure 

2 you're talking about, or the plan, what was it, 

3 for a particular thorium operation? 

4 MR. BARTON: Yes.

5 MR. HINNEFELD: And the date of 

6 that was in this '90 to '94 period?

7 MR. BARTON: It is referenced. I 

8 don't have the date in my notes here, but it was 

9 in this period, yes.

10 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. And so it 

11 said that anyone who's going to regularly 

12 handle thorium should have a pre-project fecal, 

13 pre-project in vivo.

14 MR. BARTON: Right.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: End of project in 

16 vivo.

17 MR. BARTON: In vivo. And then in 

18 vivo at three months.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: At three-month 

20 intervals.

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89

1 MR. BARTON: And then also, if the 

2 need arises, additional fecal sampling and in 

3 vivo counts as necessary.

4 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. And so, 

5 given that requirement -- now, what was the next 

6 part of your discussion? Why would we have 

7 somebody with --

8 MR. BARTON: Well, the entry 

9 criteria for receiving 10 percent of the DAC is 

10 that you have a fecal sample, but no in vivo 

11 counts. 

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Which would be 

13 somebody who you thought was going to do this 

14 work and maybe didn't.

15 MR. BARTON: That's one 

16 possibility. Right.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: But you're also 

18 asking about what? What about the case where 

19 you didn't have the pre-occupational, but --

20 MR. BARTON: But there's a 

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90

1 potential to be exposed at a level that would 

2 be absolutely bounded, in our mind, by 10 

3 percent of the DAC.

4 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So there 

5 are two questions: One is, should we really 

6 require that fecal sample in order to give 

7 somebody 10 percent of the DAC? 

8 MR. BARTON: Or are we at a 

9 situation, again, like the previous period, 

10 where you have -- it's very useful information 

11 to say this is one requirement for if your 

12 absolutely routine handling it, but also you 

13 sort of have to make the case that they weren't 

14 exposed to not include them in that 10 percent 

15 DAC subgroup. 

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. All right. 

17 Okay. 

18 MR. BARTON: All right. Then for 

19 the period three, this is, again, 1995 to 2006. 

20 To reconstruct monitor worker exposures we're 

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91

1 going to use the available breathing zone 

2 samples. We noted that those were contained in 

3 HIS-20, but also contained in the individual 

4 DOE monitoring files for each claimant.

5 There is no coworker dose to be 

6 assigned, or was proposed to be assigned after 

7 1994. This was, again, first discussed in the 

8 September meeting. And, Stu, I'll get to quote 

9 you again. "The thorium area would be defined. 

10 And if you're going into this, into the thorium 

11 radiological area or the airborne, everybody 

12 had a BZ with them." And I think you also noted 

13 that even when you went into the areas you wore 

14 a breathing zone.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I did.

16 MR. BARTON: So we can take a look 

17 at some of the breathing zone samples that we 

18 do have. And what we're looking at here is the 

19 number of breathing zone samples we have per 

20 year. And as you can see, there's obviously a 

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92

1 reason why 1995 was the choice to start this, 

2 because 1993 and 1994 you have very few samples. 

3 Starting in 1995, you're up close to like 1,800, 

4 somewhere around there. And it increases in 

5 1996.

6 You see this little dip here, which 

7 was a little curious. I could understand it 

8 for '98 and '99 because it seemed like that was 

9 more like a characterization. You weren't 

10 necessarily overpacking or handling the 

11 material. 2000, 2001 there were some 

12 significant shipments to NTS of the material, 

13 but it wasn't clear whether that had been 

14 packed, overpacked earlier and it was just now 

15 getting shipped off. So you see that dip. But 

16 we still have a significant number of breathing 

17 zone samples. And of course it rises from 

18 there to a maximum of near 12,000 samples in 

19 2005.

20 The next chart is very similar 

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93

1 except instead of total number of samples, 

2 we're looking at the total number of monitored 

3 workers. And, again, it closely mirrors the 

4 total number of samples. You sort of have that 

5 dip from '98 to 2001. But for many years -- for 

6 example, 1966, you have a little over 400 

7 workers who were monitored via this breathing 

8 zone for thorium.

9 I talked before about the claimant 

10 who stated that they were involved with the 

11 thorium overpack operations. And I wanted to 

12 read this from their CATI report, because I 

13 think it's very informative as to the 

14 conditions that were happening. Again, the 

15 claimant specified a pretty exact period of 

16 time. Not the actual dates, but the span of 

17 time that they were involved with thorium 

18 overpacking.

19 But this is directly from the CATI 

20 report. And obviously for Privacy Act reasons 

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94

1 a lot of it is redacted. So anywhere it says 

2 "redacted," I'm just going to read it in as 

3 claimant. 

4 So the claimant worked in the 

5 thorium overpack site where the claimant 

6 remotely operated a device that would move 

7 drums around. The claimant had to dress out 

8 and enter the building to get on an electric 

9 forklift, went over to the actual boxes they 

10 loaded the drums in, the overpacks. The 

11 claimant put a lid on the boxes and set them in 

12 an area for the chemical operators to clean. 

13 Then the rad techs came into survey them. If 

14 they were clean, they were sent out to a driver 

15 on the 'clean' area on process side and then 

16 they were sent to an area to be readied to ship 

17 offsite. 

18 In the thorium overpack, the 

19 claimant had to wear double sets of cloth 

20 coveralls. The claimant had to wear a cloth 

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95

1 hood. The claimant always wore a full-face 

2 respirator in the thorium overpack area. The 

3 claimant had lapel monitoring done when the 

4 claim was in the thorium overpack. And the 

5 claimant was dressed out in double sets of 

6 anti-contamination clothing, or anti-Cs. 

7 So that's a pretty descriptive 

8 version of what was happening. And I can say 

9 that this would have been sort of in the early 

10 1995, '96, '97 period. And as I said before, 

11 there were numerous breathing zone samples 

12 identified with this claimant for the exact 

13 span that they indicated they were involved in 

14 the thorium overpack operation. Looking at 

15 those samples, it looks like on average they 

16 were probably pulled every six to seven days, 

17 but that varied somewhat. Sometimes it would 

18 be very two days. Sometimes 10 days or so.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Can I just comment 

20 on the record? The BZ samples, the record is 

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96

1 a weekly compilation of all the BZs that person 

2 wore that day.

3 MR. BARTON: Okay.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Are they counted 

5 daily?

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. Sampled 

7 every time. They would have a daily sampler. 

8 Whatever their shift was, they would have a 

9 daily sampler and it would be analyzed daily. 

10 And then their record, though, what's kept in 

11 HIS-20, would be the weekly compilation of the 

12 samples they wore. So if you see a six-day 

13 period, the person probably worked Saturday. 

14 They were sampled, for some periods at least, 

15 every one of those days, and that's a 

16 compilation of the six. If there's only two or 

17 three days, it looks like, that means those were 

18 the days on that week that they were sampled.

19 MR. BARTON: And it was evident 

20 looking at that that the numerical results 

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97

1 themselves reflected sort of the number of days 

2 that happened. So at first we looked at it 

3 as like, well, these seem kind of sporadic, but 

4 when you actually get into the data set, you can 

5 see that it's exactly what you described.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, you had a 

7 daily sampler. Every day they would take it 

8 and they counted, like you said, thousands, 

9 thousands of BZ samples.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: So the last bullet 

11 that suggests they were pulled every six to 

12 seven days --

13 MR. BARTON: That's what appeared 

14 like in the HIS-20 records.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: That's the way the 

16 record would look because of the way the record 

17 was prepared.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. Right. 

19 The samples were pulled daily.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: They were daily.

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98

1 MR. BARTON: Right. No, I didn't 

2 want to infer that they only took a breathing 

3 zone every six or seven days. I was just --

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, I thought you 

5 were suggesting initially that they wore it for 

6 seven days and then it was compounded and --

7 MR. HINNEFELD: The pump wouldn't 

8 last that long. 

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. Well, 

10 yeah, plus you --

11 MR. HINNEFELD: The batteries, I 

12 mean. The batteries on the pump wouldn't last 

13 that long. 

14 MR. BARTON: Okay. In this last 

15 section again we're getting back to thoron. 

16 And, Joyce, if I have you on the phone, I would 

17 like some help if I kind of stumble over myself 

18 here.

19 But essentially what our concerns 

20 here were, not necessarily the calculation 

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99

1 itself, but how transparent the actual 

2 assumptions were in selecting the various 

3 values. For instance, Item 1 here is 

4 essentially an estimate of source term. And we 

5 saw a few different numbers that seemed to 

6 contradict each other, and we weren't sure why 

7 certain numbers for the source term in metric 

8 tons were chosen.

9 Number two, we talk about the 

10 release fraction. And, again, even in that 

11 White Paper, it seemed to range from 10 to the 

12 minus 3 to 10 to the minus 6, which is factor 

13 of three orders of magnitude. And the selected 

14 value was I believe somewhere in between there. 

15 And it really comes down to, when these thoron 

16 calculations were made, we didn't see the 

17 justification that you'd like to see to assure 

18 that when you select these values, which 

19 ultimately go into the calculation to get 

20 potential thoron exposures, we feel like you 

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100

1 really need to sort of buttress that argument 

2 and say why did we select this value, if we 

3 selected it, because of this condition? And so 

4 that is scientifically justified, but also 

5 claimant-favorable.

6 The other two, the occupancy 

7 factor. Again, it selected three months of 

8 essential exposure up through 1989. And then 

9 it said one month during the final closure. I 

10 assume that means 1990 and beyond. Again, we 

11 just didn't see necessarily the rationale for 

12 selecting those occupancy times.

13 And then also the specific 

14 activity. Joyce, do you want to speak a little 

15 bit on this one? Do we still have you?

16 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Okay. The 

17 specific activity of thoron was given assuming 

18 exposures occurred six to 12 months after 

19 separation and an equilibrium fraction of 

20 thorium-228/thorium-232 of .65. And we have 

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101

1 some referencing that the equilibrium 

2 fraction, for example, for materials in 

3 Building 65 was at least .95. 

4 So I think, you know, all those 

5 various factors that were chosen to calculate 

6 the thorium exposures, they don't have really 

7 a scientific justification of saying, oh, we 

8 assume this because it was claimant-favorable. 

9 They were just taken. And there are many 

10 contradictions between the ones that were 

11 chosen and the various ones that I cited in 

12 the -- even in the same draft and some in the 

13 papers that were related to Fernald. So we 

14 would like to have this reevaluated and 

15 justified.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. Of course, 

17 we only received the written review, what, a 

18 week-and-a-half ago, something like that. So 

19 it will take us a little while to go through it 

20 and --

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102

1 MR. BARTON: And we're not 

2 necessarily saying that these values that were 

3 chosen are wrong. We just wanted to see --

4 MR. HINNEFELD: The basis for why 

5 we did it.

6 MR. BARTON: The basis, yeah.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Better 

8 understand them?

9 MR. BARTON: Exactly. Exactly. 

10 So that we know why we're selecting the 

11 different values.

12 And, Joyce, you also -- this last 

13 bullet here about possible handling of 

14 radium-228.

15 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yeah, this goes 

16 back to that maybe misunderstanding that all 

17 actinium would be used as a supported 

18 radium-228 exposure. I think that we have 

19 first to resolve that and then come back. But 

20 if they were unsupported radium-228 exposures, 

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103

1 then the thorium associated with this 

2 radium-228 exposure should be also added. 

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, I think that 

4 really the only mechanism I can think for 

5 unsupported radium intake would be a raffinate 

6 exposure, because, I mean, it would exist in the 

7 waste stream of the thorium purification 

8 process. And there was no other source, I 

9 don't think, of thorium-228. So I would say 

10 there was none that was stored except that it 

11 was one of the materials that was pumped out to 

12 the waste storage pits. There was lots of 

13 uranium raffinate.

14 MR. BARTON: Okay. And so the 

15 final slide here is sort of our main 

16 conclusions. The first one is that SC&A feels 

17 that dose reconstruction for internal thorium 

18 is feasible and can be performed in a 

19 claimant-favorable manner. And as I said, we 

20 have a few issues that maybe need to be vetted 

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104

1 a little bit, such as the selection of the 

2 derived air concentration, but that's not 

3 something that would render reconstruction of 

4 internal thorium infeasible. 

5 And the second bullet here we had a 

6 discussion on, and that's we felt that maybe the 

7 application of unmonitored coworker doses 

8 could be too restrictive, but perhaps that 

9 wasn't really the intent. And then, as we 

10 talked about, those types of exposures could be 

11 illustrated by some job categories, but 

12 ultimately the onus is on the program to 

13 demonstrate that they shouldn't be assigned 

14 thorium exposures versus the onus being that we 

15 have to demonstrate that they should be. So, 

16 again, it's sort of coming from that other 

17 direction.

18 And then, as we just discussed with 

19 the thoron, we'd like to see more scientific 

20 justification for the assumed values that were 

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105

1 used in those calculations.

2 So those are really our main 

3 conclusions. Any additional questions? 

4 MR. HINNEFELD: I kind of 

5 interrupted with mine as we went. 

6 MR. BARTON: What?

7 MR. HINNEFELD: I interrupted you 

8 while we went and asked all my questions.

9 MR. BARTON: Okay.

10 (Laughter.)

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Anybody on the 

12 phone? Does anybody on the phone from ORAU 

13 want to offer anything? If you don't, that's 

14 okay, but do you want to ask questions or pursue 

15 anything?

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Do you know off the

17 top of your head whether the higher -- if you 

18 can go back to the previous -- maybe it's the 

19 second-to-the-last slide where I think Joyce 

20 was comparing the -- go back one more slide. 

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106

1 Oh, here it is. The equilibrium fraction. 

2 Maybe it’s the next one again. Go forward one. 

3 MR. BARTON: This is the next 

4 thoron slide.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, here it is. 

6 Yeah. Do we know off the top of our heads 

7 whether the .65 versus the .95, which would 

8 actually be more claimant-favorable? Just 

9 off the top of our head, does anybody even --

10 you haven't looked at it maybe.

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Haven't really 

12 looked at it. Let's see. Well --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: I mean, obviously 

14 they haven't said why they chose the .65. And 

15 that was your point, but I'm wondering do know 

16 specifically if that would end up for some 

17 reason being more claimant-favorable? 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: If that ratio were 

19 higher --

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: It gives you 

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107

1 more --

2 MR. HINNEFELD: -- there would be 

3 more thoron --

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: More?

5 MR. STIVER: You'd have higher 228 

6 concentration, which would be the --

7 (Simultaneous speaking.)

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: No. Let's see. 

9 If it's close to one -- if it's .95, the two are 

10 about equal. If it's .65, then I think you’ve 

11 got more 232, the denominator is larger.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Right.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: But I don't know 

14 how the energies are there, the alphas and so 

15 on.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: I think that this 

17 relates to the source term of the thoron, which 

18 would be approximated by the activity --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: If you don't know 

20 off the top of your head, I was just curious.

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108

1 (Simultaneous speaking.)

2 MR. HINNEFELD: I think if those 

3 two were closer to equilibrium, then you would 

4 have more thoron per gram of residue. That's 

5 right, isn't it?

6 DR. LIPSZTEIN: Yeah, you would 

7 have more thorium.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, you would 

9 have more thoron.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Thoron or --

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Well --

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: If they were 

13 closer, you would have more 228.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: But the question is 

15 about the thoron source term.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah. Right.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: And so the closer 

18 that ratio is to one, the more thoron you'll 

19 have per gram of residue.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

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109

1 MR. HINNEFELD: And so what the 

2 question is, is why did you choose a .65 

3 equilibrium when certainly if the materials had 

4 been stored in Building 65 all that time it

5 would seem like it would be different than that. 

6 It would be higher than that. So I think that's 

7 the question. 

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah. In that 

9 connection, I think Bob had mentioned that 

10 there was an issue with whether that was a 

11 claimant-favorable assumption. I just 

12 wondered if anybody knew. But obviously we 

13 don't know right off the top of our heads.

14 MR. BARTON: It all boils down to 

15 again we just -- when you select these values 

16 among --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: What's the basis, 

18 yeah. 

19 MR. BARTON: Yes.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Got you.

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110

1 MR. KATZ: Just going back, Stu had 

2 asked NIOSH ORAU folks on the line whether you 

3 had any other clarifications you needed before 

4 we close this part of the discussion.

5 (No response.)

6 MR. KATZ: No?

7 MR. HINNEFELD: I have one question 

8 before we close. How comfortable is the Work 

9 Group with SC&A's main conclusion?

10 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: I feel good 

11 about it, but the thing is we just -- some 

12 clarifying questions. It's never been -- we 

13 know what you guys can do. It's just how the 

14 process is going to --

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, the first 

17 bullet I think is fine. I mean, we're all in 

18 agreement there, right? The second bullet 

19 you're only asking for clarification of that 

20 issue that we discussed about restricting the 

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111

1 list or --

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Right. Yeah, 

3 that's the one that -- that's the issue that I'm 

4 sympathetic to, and I understand --

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I think you've 

6 sort of agreed to it.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I think we've 

9 sort of agreed to it.

10 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Yes, we have. 

11 Well, I have. I'm not speaking for the group.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, no. And there 

13 are some others in the Work Group not here, but 

14 conceptually I think we're sort of -- and then 

15 the third one is clarification. And once we 

16 get that, then we have to decide whether we 

17 agree with that. 

18 MR. HINNEFELD: And, I mean, our 

19 parameters might change and we might say, okay, 

20 good point. We'll change these parameters.

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112

1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah. So I -- if 

2 you were -- who is asking the question?

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I asked the 

4 question about --

5 (Simultaneous speaking.)

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yeah, I think we're 

7 comfortable with what the issues that were 

8 raised and --

9 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right. The one 

10 question I did have was one that has come back 

11 to me many times, and that's the difference in 

12 the tonnage of the thorium that we've had there, 

13 because coming from other sites and so forth 

14 like this, Fernald actually has become the

15 dumping place for that. And. I mean, I saw six 

16 train cars from Hanford. Do we have for sure 

17 a tonnage of what was actually there?

18 MR. BARTON: Well, that would be --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, part of the 

20 question with the tonnage issue was one of the 

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113

1 clarifications, wasn't it?

2 MR. HINNEFELD: I would think 

3 certainly there was -- I don't know we have now. 

4 Certainly, Fernald knew how much thorium it --

5 it was an accountable material like uranium 

6 was.

7 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right. Well, 

8 yeah, I was just -- and if you pulled back to 

9 that one, I was just looking at the different --

10 300 metric tons in the storage site and 450 

11 quoted over 2,000 tons of material. And I just 

12 wanted to make sure that we did have -- because 

13 it's kind of hard to follow a lot of this 

14 sometimes because some of it was coming in and 

15 some of it was going out. But I know that in 

16 documents that were pulled from Hanford that I 

17 was reading it was amazing to me that I was 

18 finding Fernald paperwork at Hanford.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: They got 

20 everything.

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114

1 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Well, it was 

2 actually the shipments to Fernald of this. And 

3 I was looking at well over 800 tons. So that's 

4 why that one kind of just sticks out to me. I 

5 just wanted to make sure that we -- but also, 

6 too, in the same process we could have some 

7 tonnage coming in and some going out all through 

8 the years. 

9 MR. STIVER: Yeah, there's some 

10 kind of mass balance involved --

11 (Simultaneous speaking.)

12 CHAIRMAN CLAWSON: Right. 

13 Because there's been quite a bit of discussion 

14 of how much we really had, and I just wanted to 

15 make sure that we put that one to bed, too, even 

16 what has been processed through there. 

17 Because sometimes they were being repackaged 

18 and redone and have gone forward.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: These numbers are 

20 apparently from the document we wrote about the 

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115

1 thorium approach. And so I'll just have to 

2 take a look and see why there are different 

3 numbers. I mean, the easy thing that comes to 

4 mind is that one or more of those numbers might 

5 be thorium tons, and the other one might be 

6 residue. I don't know if that's true or not.

7 MR. BARTON: That would be part of 

8 sort of the justification.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Yeah, that's not an 

10 explanation. I just made that up. I don't 

11 think --

12 (Laughter.)

13 (Simultaneous speaking.)

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don't mind 

15 if I'm quoted as long as I'm quoted saying that 

16 I made it up. 

17 (Laughter.)

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Bob, a quick 

19 question here. As we look back on these 

20 slides, the three points on the major 

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116

1 assumptions, you list the assumptions, but you 

2 also raise some questions in there. I'm not 

3 sure those -- did those questions show up in 

4 your conclusions?

5 MR. BARTON: If we could go back to 

6 the conclusions, it's that third bullet point 

7 that those main parameters for the thoron 

8 calculations --

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, that was 

10 intended to cover these, all of those? Okay.

11 MR. BARTON: Yeah. 

12 MR. KATZ: Can I suggest a comfort 

13 break?

14 MR. HINNEFELD: I was hoping you 

15 would. I was going to suggest it.

16 MR. KATZ: Okay. How about 10 

17 minutes?

18 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

19 matter went off the record at 10:36 a.m. and 

20 resumed at 10:46 a.m.)

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117

1 MR. KATZ: Okay. Welcome back, 

2 everyone. Folks on the line, I hope we have 

3 you, too.

4 I will just take this opportunity, 

5 then, and let me check and see if maybe Mark has 

6 joined us. Mark Griffon?

7 (No response.)

8 Okay. Not yet?

9 Do we need to check on anyone else 

10 on the line?

11 Joyce, do we have you back on the 

12 line?

13 (No response.)

14 Do we have anyone on the line?

15 MS. LIN: Ted, this is Jenny Lin. 

16 I'm here.

17 MR. KATZ: Okay, good. I just 

18 wanted to make sure that we were being heard.

19 MR. KINMAN: Yes, Ted, this is 

20 Josh. I joined the meeting around 9:15 today.

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118

1 MR. KATZ: Okay, great. Welcome, 

2 Josh.

3 Okay. I don't know if you need 

4 Joyce right now. Do you?

5 MR. STIVER: I don't think we 

6 really need her at this particular moment, but 

7 she will be back on soon, I would think.

8 MR. KATZ: Let the record reflect 

9 we don't need Joyce now.

10 (Laughter.)

11 MR. STIVER: Okay. On this 

12 particular issue.

13 DR. LIPSZTEIN: I'm listening.

14 (Laughter.)

15 MR. KATZ: Okay. I didn't mean 

16 that personally, Joyce.

17 MR. BARTON: We knew you were there 

18 the whole time.

19 MR. STIVER: Okay. I guess we can 

20 go ahead and get started.

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119

1 I have shared the list version of 

2 the Issues Matrix on Live Meeting. So, you 

3 should be able to see we're on TBD Issue No. 4. 

4 And I would just like to go through the open 

5 issues that we can have a substantive 

6 discussion on today. I believe there's about 

7 11 of them.

8 No. 4, this is one you will find 

9 attached. It is the Guidance to the TBD 

10 regarding exposures from redrumming of thorium 

11 is not well founded and is not 

12 claimant-favorable.

13 And this is one of those legacy 

14 issues from a time when thorium intakes would 

15 be determined based on air-sampling data. And 

16 we decided to keep this thing, this particular 

17 issue, open based on a review of the post-SEC 

18 Thorium Report.

19 And, basically, for this period

20 1990 to 1994, we were kind of concerned that 

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120

1 redrumming was going on, repackaging, and that 

2 maybe we should take a look at that before we 

3 are willing to close this out.

4 And based on today's discussions, I 

5 think we are in agreement that this particular 

6 issue can be closed out.

7 I am trying to bring this down to 

8 page 7.

9 So, we wanted to keep this open and 

10 in progress until we some time to discuss this. 

11 I think, based on our conclusions and the Work 

12 Group acceptance, that we can go ahead and close 

13 out TBD Issue No. 4.

14 Anybody have any comments or 

15 questions on it?

16 CHAIR CLAWSON: I just wanted to 

17 make sure what the whole question was. There 

18 were a couple of pages there. Just the 

19 guidance on the --

20 MR. STIVER: Well, remember this 

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121

1 was the TBD from 2004. There just wasn't a lot 

2 of guidance about the exposures from redrumming 

3 and how it would be addressed, and so forth. 

4 This is something that we can read down through 

5 the text --

6 CHAIR CLAWSON: Right.

7 MR. STIVER: -- and read everything 

8 into the record. But it is something that has 

9 evolved over the time, and we got into the 

10 discussion of DWE exposures, our report on 

11 that, the determinations of SECs.

12 And so, really, the only thing that 

13 was really outstanding was what was going to be 

14 done post-1989, since we have the coworker 

15 model from 1979 to 1988, we have the SEC 

16 preceding that. And so, we just wanted to make 

17 sure we had a chance to evaluate the current 

18 guidance in post-SEC thorium and how that is 

19 going to be handled.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Question, John. 

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122

1 Do you need to see anything in writing on the 

2 issues that were raised today to close this 

3 or --

4 MR. STIVER: I think we probably 

5 want to see --

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I am really 

7 asking you, I mean, we certainly have kind of 

8 an agreement.

9 MR. STIVER: Yes. I think we 

10 probably --

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: There are some 

12 things, some explanations. I am wondering if 

13 it is in abeyance versus closed. I'm not sure. 

14 This one looks pretty general.

15 MR. STIVER: Yes, this is one that 

16 really wasn't a particular issue regarding dose 

17 reconstruction.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. It is the 

19 guidance that --

20 MR. STIVER: Yes, it is kind of an 

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123

1 overarching thing. You know, there is very 

2 little guidance in the --

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, broadly, you 

4 are okay with what the guidance is?

5 MR. STIVER: Yes.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: As opposed to some 

7 other ones that are more --

8 MR. STIVER: I think that, because 

9 of that, this one could be closed. There's 

10 nothing that is going to be coming out in the 

11 new TBD that is going to really impinge on this 

12 one.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

14 CHAIR CLAWSON: So, this doesn't 

15 come down to who they accepted?

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, that is covered 

17 by other ones in there.

18 MR. STIVER: Yes, that is going to 

19 be covered in there.

20 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. That was my 

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124

1 question, because it seemed like this is what 

2 we had just gone over earlier.

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, this is a 

4 broad guidance.

5 MR. STIVER: Yes, this is a broad 

6 guidance that is going to be incorporated into 

7 TBD 5.

8 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

9 MR. STIVER: Like I said, it is kind 

10 of a legacy.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: I was just asking 

12 if you are looking for any new wording.

13 MR. STIVER: Not particularly.

14 MR. BARTON: Well, I think NIOSH 

15 was going to finalize the approach. As you 

16 said, there were some wording in there; it may 

17 be confusing. So, I guess it is kind of just 

18 a --

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Is that part of the 

20 guidance?

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125

1 MR. BARTON: Well, we have several 

2 sort of thorium-related findings in here that 

3 are all just assumed by the approach we just 

4 discussed. So, while we do kind of need to see 

5 the final product --

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, but, see, 

7 those could be in abeyance.

8 MR. BARTON: Yes.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's this specific 

10 one, can this be closed.

11 MR. STIVER: This particular one I 

12 don't feel needs to be in abeyence. There is 

13 really nothing that NIOSH is going to do that 

14 is going to really impinge on this kind of this 

15 kind of --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: On this one? If 

17 that is the case, I'm okay with it, Brad.

18 CHAIR CLAWSON: I have no problem 

19 with it. Okay.

20 MR. KATZ: Okay, closed.

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126

1 MR. STIVER: Okay. Let it be read 

2 into the record that TBD Issue 4 is closed.

3 Now TBD Issue 5 is kind of similar 

4 in a way. This, again, was related primarily 

5 to the use of DWE data. And this was the notion 

6 that the TBD had not evaluated exposures due to 

7 thorium fires. Small fires, spills, 

8 explosions were commonplace, and it is unlikely 

9 that most of the air sampling data that we are 

10 compiling will necessarily reflect those 

11 radiological incidents.

12 And again, this was one that we 

13 felt, because there is this post-SEC thorium 

14 evaluation, that we would want to go ahead and 

15 keep it open until such time as we had to discuss 

16 this.

17 Again, this gets to whether it 

18 be -- the model is considered bounding for 

19 incidents and fires and things of that nature. 

20 And I think we have established that the models 

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127

1 that NIOSH is putting forth are sufficiently 

2 claimant-favorable to cover short-term 

3 incidents that took place, based on monitoring 

4 data.

5 If you are looking at the 

6 air-sampling data, then you have problems of 

7 whether you have a complete set of data that 

8 would adequately represent those types of 

9 incidents. But, by using bioassay data, you 

10 can kind of sidestep that problem.

11 MR. BARTON: And also, you know, 

12 the first part of this is during fires, which 

13 really isn't relevant to the period we are 

14 talking about.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: This is in 

16 operation. This was an earlier issue.

17 MR. STIVER: You're looking back in 

18 the fifties and sixties.

19 MR. BARTON: Right, and there were 

20 maybe a handful of documented small-scale 

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128

1 spills during the early overpacking 

2 operations, but they are really 

3 well-documented and they had air sampling and 

4 everyone was bioassayed.

5 So, now that we have the coworker 

6 model in place, I don't think this is really 

7 relevant anymore.

8 CHAIR CLAWSON: A relevant issue?

9 MR. STIVER: Yes, this is another 

10 one that I don't think revisions to the TBD 5 

11 are going to impinge on closure of this 

12 particular issue.

13 CHAIR CLAWSON: I have no problem.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I agree, let's 

15 close it.

16 MR. STIVER: Okay. The next one is 

17 a little trickier. This is TBD Issue 7, and 

18 this gets back to -- I'm just going to read it.

19 "The TBD is a non-specified method 

20 for estimating doses in the raffinate stream." 

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129

1 This gets back to the whole idea of raffinates 

2 for more process than in plants 2 and 3, and it 

3 is kind of two-pronged thing.

4 One was what we call the use of the 

5 radon breath data for transferring the Q-11.

6 CHAIR CLAWSON: So, this is the 

7 raffinates.

8 MR. STIVER: This is the 

9 raffinates. There's kind of two sides to this. 

10 One is the dumping of the hot raffinates, Q-11 

11 raffinates, those that came from Mallinckrodt 

12 as well as those that were produced onsite into 

13 silos 1 and 2, and how do you get a handle on 

14 exposures to radium and thorium and some of the 

15 daughter products that are contained in the 

16 raffinates without some sort of uranium values 

17 bioassay.

18 And NIOSH, over a course of a period 

19 of time -- I believe this was in 2008 where they 

20 put forth a methodology using the radon breath 

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130

1 analysis to get some kind of hook back to these 

2 thorium-230 and radium-226 exposures during 

3 these operations. And we agreed in previous 

4 Work Group discussions that we were fine with 

5 that.

6 The other aspect, though, was 

7 situations where you had workers who were 

8 exposed, potentially exposed, to raffinate 

9 streams that we have been elevating to 

10 thorium-230, but that were depleted in radium 

11 and uranium. In a situation like this, you 

12 couldn't use the radon breath data. We didn't 

13 have radon breath data for those people for that 

14 matter. Or we were concerned about using urine 

15 bioassay because, you know, essentially, there 

16 is going to be no uranium in there. You are 

17 looking at background levels, if you are able 

18 to, in fact, identify those workers who were in 

19 that particular facility for that particular 

20 time during these operations.

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131

1 And so, we had talked about 

2 this -- oh, gosh, let's see, who produced the 

3 paper? I think Joyce did back in 2010 looking 

4 at this issue. NIOSH responded by updating 

5 Report 52 to address this.

6 And at the April 2011 Work Group 

7 meeting, there was some discussion on this 

8 particular issue. We felt that it was probably 

9 possible to bound these thorium-230 intakes for 

10 these people, in theory, kind of as a general 

11 principle. However, there are still some kind 

12 of issues out there, I think mainly by virtue 

13 of the fact that the guidance or the discussion 

14 in Report 52 and our discussion back in that 

15 time took place at a time when we felt that this 

16 DWE data for the various buildings, the thorium 

17 DWE air sampling data, could be used in a way 

18 that would allow us to identify particular 

19 conditions in a plant for a given period of 

20 time. And so, you could, then, identify 

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132

1 workers.

2 If you could identify who was in, 

3 say, building 3 on the cold side of the 

4 raffinate stream, then you would kind of have 

5 the ability to take a look at their bioassay 

6 data and, then, assume some particular addition 

7 of thorium-230, either based on equilibrium 

8 assumption or the ratios from silo 3, which I 

9 believe the ratios were at 60 nanocuries per 

10 gram of thorium to about 3.5 nanocuries of 

11 uranium.

12 And so, we kind of agreed in theory 

13 that that could be done. But, in the meantime, 

14 you recall that the SECs for thorium, at least 

15 the big one, are based on DOE data, 1954 to 1967, 

16 really came about because it was demonstrated 

17 that you really couldn't identify who was in a 

18 particular plant at a particular time.

19 And so, we still have some concerns 

20 about that. And as you see on page 7 here, we 

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133

1 felt that this particular issue at this point 

2 was too complex to be put into abeyance without 

3 a formal review of what NIOSH puts forth in the 

4 TBD 5 revision. And so, we wanted to keep this 

5 one open. This also applies to the next 

6 finding, Finding No. 8.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. Finding No. 

8 7 is quantifying exposures to raffinate 

9 materials.

10 MR. STIVER: Right. It was just 

11 basically how were you going to go about doing 

12 this.

13 MR. HINNEFELD: When are we talking 

14 about? So, this is going to be after 1978 

15 probably?

16 MR. STIVER: No, no, this is 

17 actually during the fifties and sixties.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, if it’s in 

19 the SEC period --

20 MR. STIVER: Well, it is going to be 

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134

1 for non-SEC cancers, yes.

2 Now this is another thing. I was 

3 wondering who was going to bring this up first. 

4 We are looking at thorium-230. Now the SEC, 

5 but this is from a separate process stream than 

6 the thorium refining and machining and other 

7 work in production. It basically comes out of 

8 the uranium-238 process stream, but we are 

9 still looking at thorium.

10 Now the SEC doesn't specify 

11 thorium-232 or any other isotope. So, this 

12 dosage can't be reconstructed from thorium 

13 during this period of time. So, this is kind 

14 of a wrinkle here.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: So, you are looking 

16 for what is going to be in Rev 4 on this issue? 

17 Is that --

18 MR. STIVER: This is going to be the 

19 latest -- I think it is Rev 1 of the Internal 

20 Dose TBD.

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135

1 Let me just finish. I think the 

2 problem we have got here is that, if this were 

3 to be determined, the thorium-230 intakes were 

4 determined to be part of the SEC, then, for 

5 those workers who have non-SEC claims, they are 

6 not going to get that dose.

7 Whereas, otherwise, if it is 

8 considered a separate stream, as part of the 

9 uranium process stream, even though it is a 

10 thorium isotope, it is a daughter product of the 

11 U-238 and a different process altogether. If 

12 that is kind of taken out of the SEC, then it 

13 allows these people to get a more complete dose 

14 assessment or higher dose assessment, more 

15 claimant-favorable dose.

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Have we said we 

17 can't do that otherwise?

18 MR. BARTON: The problem is the 

19 language just says thorium, even though --

20 MR. STIVER: The language in the 

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136

1 SEC says thorium.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. Yes, I see 

3 the point you're making.

4 MR. KATZ: The question is not what 

5 the language says, but what the analysis was 

6 based on.

7 MR. STIVER: And what was the 

8 intent.

9 MR. KATZ: Right.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: In other words, can 

11 you reconstruct that part of it? Is that what 

12 you're asking?

13 MR. HINNEFELD: So, the question 

14 is -- now we are talking about the entire 

15 operation of the refinery and what was the 

16 raffinate exposure. Now the earliest 

17 operation of the refinery completed like silo 

18 2 and silo 3, so the K-65 and the whole metal 

19 oxide. That was the Q-11 ores, I believe, that 

20 generated those two things.

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137

1 And then, at some point, raffinate 

2 started being pumped into pits, you know, 

3 slurried into pits. So, there is a question of 

4 was there any really potentially internal 

5 exposure in the handling mechanism. It seems 

6 like it would be modest at best.

7 But I am trying to think of 

8 how -- for those modest or limited number of 

9 people who might be exposed, I don't know how 

10 you would do it.

11 MR. STIVER: Yes, I think that is 

12 really the hook, the rub here, if you will. How 

13 would you identify those people?

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, if you could, 

15 how would you do it?

16 MR. STIVER: If you could, how 

17 would you do it? Well, one method I could put 

18 out there -- I mean, I don't know if it would 

19 be considered sufficiently accurate for dose 

20 reconstruction purposes -- but you just assume 

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138

1 that, for that period of time that anybody could 

2 have possibly been in that facility and they 

3 could have been exposed, in which case you would 

4 take their urine bioassay and, then, give them 

5 an amount of thorium-230 in addition, based on 

6 the ratio, that was in that particular 

7 material. Now, maybe not grossly but that 

8 would certainly overestimate real intakes for 

9 most people. But I don't know how you could do 

10 it unless you could identify who were the 

11 workers in those particular buildings at the 

12 time.

13 MR. ROLFES: It would be pretty 

14 gross just because of the low uranium content 

15 of the waste pits.

16 MR. STIVER: Yes. Basically, when 

17 they extracted the uranium from the radium, the 

18 thorium remains. The amount of thorium is 

19 pretty much a constant amount. It was about 

20 the same between silos 1, 2, and 3. It is just 

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139

1 that the relative abundance compared to what 

2 you would use as an indicator in radionuclides 

3 is quite a bit different.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: If you had somebody 

5 currently that didn't meet the 250-day 

6 environment or had a kind of presumptive 

7 cancer, would you be giving them anything from 

8 the raffinate stream at all?

9 MR. HINNEFELD: No, no.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Because?

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I don't think 

12 we have built in a technique. I mean, the Site 

13 Profile doesn't say anything about raffinate 

14 exposure. I mean, it was uranium exposure from 

15 the bioassay.

16 MR. STIVER: Well, I think it was a 

17 technique that was in development. It is in 

18 Report 52, and there were discussions in 2010.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: How it could be 

20 done?

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140

1 MR. STIVER: Yes, as to whether it 

2 could be done, and Mark was involved.

3 MR. ROLFES: Yes, right. That was 

4 primarily, you know, relying upon the DWE data 

5 from plant 2/plant 3 to reconstruct thorium-230 

6 exposures. And in our discussion, we found, 

7 you know, that since it was a wet process, the 

8 air concentrations in those areas were really 

9 low. I mean on the order of like 10 or 20 dpm 

10 per cubic meter.

11 And one could assume, you know, a 

12 continuous exposure at that concentration to 

13 thorium-230, assuming that was the major 

14 contribution to what was observed on the air 

15 samples. But, then, when the DWE issue came 

16 up, there was reason to generate an SEC 

17 determination. That sort of left that hanging 

18 out there.

19 MR. STIVER: Yes, it was kind of a 

20 situation where --

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141

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay, I see now. 

2 That's helpful.

3 So, if we were to make the 

4 assumption that the air-sampling data in plant 

5 2/3 from the review when they were doing the DWE 

6 prep data, we said, well, this is going to be 

7 mainly -- this is a raffinate exposure, and 

8 let's treat this not as a uranium airborne, even 

9 though it may have been reported. It was 

10 counted as an alpha count --

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: -- when it was 

13 done. Let's say this is a thorium-230 intake, 

14 right? Is that what was proposed? And then, 

15 say we could assign thorium-230 intakes based 

16 on those DWE data for those years.

17 MR. ROLFES: Correct.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: And then, that will 

19 cover most of the operating period. Well, that 

20 DWE data is actually a little older. It goes 

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142

1 back to what, around the seventies?

2 MR. ROLFES: These DWE data cover 

3 like the fifties --

4 MR. HINNEFELD: Fifties, sixties, 

5 but they go up through about 1970.

6 MR. ROLFES: 1968, correct, yes.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So, then, 

8 that leaves us -- you know, we could 

9 extrapolate those data based on, say, 

10 production numbers. I think we might be able 

11 to find the refinery production numbers in some 

12 historical documents, like historical release 

13 documents or something like the throughputs of 

14 the various plants.

15 MR. ROLFES: Yes.

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Because the DWE 

17 data stops at, you say, '68.

18 MR. STIVER: 1968 is when they 

19 basically stopped altogether.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. So, the 

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143

1 refinery did operate some after that. It was 

2 not a full-time operation, I don't think, after 

3 about 1970, but they would run campaigns, a 

4 refinery campaign. And then, those operators 

5 would move over to plant 4 and they would run 

6 that campaign.

7 So, we could extrapolate that based 

8 on sort of a throughput kind of thing for the 

9 remainder of the period. And then, the 

10 refinery maybe ran once in the eighties. It 

11 didn't run --

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: But what I was 

13 asking was, the SEC itself did not include this 

14 as something that couldn't be reconstructed 

15 based on --

16 MR. HINNEFELD: It wasn't part of 

17 the analysis we did when we --

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. Right. 

19 That's what I'm saying. So, it is fair game to 

20 consider it.

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144

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

3 MR. STIVER: You can certainly 

4 consider it as, you know, a different 

5 technique. I mean, we have done that. We have 

6 used DWE data for other --

7 MR. HINNEFELD: So, then, what we 

8 need to do is propose something.

9 MR. STIVER: Right.

10 MR. ROLFES: The question is, can 

11 we use the DWE data, because the DWE data were 

12 said not to be good for --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, that is sort 

14 of what I'm asking, yes. Are they tied 

15 together?

16 MR. HINNEFELD: The DWE data were 

17 decided not to be good for thorium exposures at 

18 the various plants because the DWE data wasn't 

19 really thorium.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: No.

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145

1 MR. HINNEFELD: In this instance, 

2 we are going to say, in all likelihood, the 

3 plant 2/3 airborne data was thorium-230.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

5 MR. HINNEFELD: That's what we are 

6 going to say.

7 MR. STIVER: It was probably after 

8 because there is certainly depleted uranium.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: In reality, at the 

10 end of plant 2/3 was where they sucked the UO3 

11 out of the reduction pump. So, those samples 

12 would have been uranium, and the DWE studies 

13 might actually let us exclude those. I don't 

14 know. I would have to go back and see how much 

15 actual data -- some of those DWE studies gave 

16 the job title and job and what result was 

17 associated with that job.

18 And so, it would be called the 

19 gulping station. That is what they called it. 

20 That is where they sucked the product UO3 out 

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146

1 of the final boildown, the denitration pump.

2 And so, I'm just talking out loud 

3 here. You could exclude, if the DWE study was 

4 specific enough, you could exclude those air 

5 data from your plant 2/3 compilation, consider 

6 the rest, you know, for simplicity purposes, or 

7 maybe just for simplicity purposes, use 2/3. I 

8 mean, what does it matter? Just say, okay, 

9 these are thorium-230 samples and we consider 

10 that for thorium-230 intakes, because that is 

11 where the exposures would have occurred. 

12 Since we probably won't know who was there, we 

13 would do similar kinds of things. If there is 

14 no reason to exclude this person, they will be 

15 included, kind of thing.

16 MR. STIVER: Yes, that is kind of 

17 what we are envisioning, something along those 

18 lines.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Okay. I'm glad 

20 there is a transcript of this meeting because 

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147

1 I didn't take any notes when I was just talking.

2 (Laughter.)

3 MR. BARTON: Did you make all that 

4 up, too?

5 (Laughter.)

6 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, that I really 

7 was making up.

8 (Laughter.)

9 MR. KATZ: In real-time.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, even so, it 

11 made sense.

12 (Laughter.)

13 MR. KATZ: It made lots of sense. 

14 So, there is a path forward there.

15 MR. HINNEFELD: Like we were 

16 talking yesterday, you don't want to cheat 

17 anybody out of any non-presumptive cancers out 

18 of anything. And if we can do something there, 

19 that might be worth doing.

20 MR. STIVER: Yes, that is something 

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148

1 we can look into for the next get-together that 

2 we have.

3 MR. KATZ: So, this is in progress.

4 MR. STIVER: Yes, keep it in 

5 progress.

6 MR. BARTON: I guess really the 

7 first question was, was that in the SEC --

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: You know, is it 

9 even in progress?

10 MR. BARTON: And if it is fair 

11 game --

12 MR. KATZ: Yes.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: It hasn't really 

14 started yet, right?

15 MR. KATZ: As soon as you discuss 

16 it, it is in progress.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's in progress, 

18 okay. Okay.

19 MR. BARTON: We need formal 

20 definitions for those terms.

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149

1 (Laughter.)

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, we have them. 

3 Wanda has defined them. So, we use that, 

4 right?

5 MR. STIVER: Okay, we're going to 

6 settle on in progress in 7 and 8.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: In progress.

8 MR. KATZ: And 8, is that what you 

9 said?

10 MR. STIVER: Eight is basically 

11 related to 7, only it is who is going to get the 

12 model --

13 MR. KATZ: Okay.

14 MR. STIVER: -- that's going to be 

15 applied.

16 CHAIR CLAWSON: And that we 

17 actually kind of just went over?

18 MR. KATZ: Yes.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's the same 

20 thing, right?

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150

1 CHAIR CLAWSON: It's the same 

2 thing.

3 MR. ROLFES: They'll be in progress 

4 until they are able to develop the model.

5 MR. STIVER: Okay, that brings 

6 us --

7 MR. ROLFES: Someone on the line 

8 just asked if we could all speak up a little bit, 

9 that they're having trouble hearing some 

10 speakers.

11 MR. KATZ: Oh, dear.

12 MR. ROLFES: Thanks.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: I've got a 

14 microphone over here. Have you got one there, 

15 Brad?

16 CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes.

17 MR. ROLFES: It was Bob and John. 

18 I guess they were having trouble hearing.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Is that a phone 

20 microphone down there? That's the recorder's 

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151

1 microphone.

2 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, this is the 

3 microphone we're using, right?

4 MR. KATZ: I don't know if that 

5 microphone is --

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: The phone 

7 microphone is --

8 MR. KATZ: Yesterday we had three.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: The phone 

10 microphone is this, right?

11 MR. KATZ: Yes.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: It's the flat thing 

13 somewhere, or is it?

14 MR. KATZ: Right. Yesterday we 

15 had one down there.

16 CHAIR CLAWSON: Oh, it's actually 

17 down there, Paul.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Shall we move it 

19 down.

20 MR. KATZ: Well, Paul needs to be 

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152

1 heard, too.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I can move it 

3 that way.

4 MR. KATZ: We had three yesterday.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Is there another 

6 one?

7 MR. KATZ: Try that. Well, try 

8 that, and we will see if people have problems 

9 hearing Paul.

10 CHAIR CLAWSON: How about that? 

11 Can people hear us better?

12 MR. STIVER: Can you hear me now?

13 (No response.)

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Anybody on the 

15 phone?

16 MS. LIN: Yes. Yes, loud and 

17 clear.

18 MS. CHALMERS: Yes, that sounds 

19 good.

20 MR. KATZ: Okay.

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153

1 MR. STIVER: Okay, the next one, we 

2 will move on to -- hang on for just a second. 

3 I'm having a slow response on the link here.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Probably 9.

5 MR. STIVER: Actually, it's Number 

6 10.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, you show 9 as in 

8 abeyance. So, that is just sitting there.

9 MR. STIVER: Yes, these are ones 

10 that were --

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, it stays, 

12 right?

13 MR. STIVER: Yes. I didn't want to 

14 go back over ones that were in abeyance that we 

15 don't have any additional information on to 

16 move forward.

17 MR. KATZ: Right.

18 MR. STIVER: Rather than just kind 

19 of restate what have we done in the past.

20 Let me change the view here where we 

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154

1 can scroll down, kind of jump back and forth.

2 Okay, the next one that was kind of 

3 interesting that came up last time was Finding 

4 Number 10. And this is this notion that the 

5 radionuclides list, the recycled uranium in the 

6 TBD is incomplete. And we talked about this a 

7 little bit at the last meeting, this notion of 

8 what do you do about americium-241.

9 And I know Stu at the time had 

10 questioned whether it should even be included 

11 in recycled uranium at all. I mean, this is a 

12 nuclide that was not addressed in the DWE 

13 reports on recycled uranium. They looked at 

14 plutonium, neptunium-237, and technetium-99 

15 almost exclusively. And so, our review of 

16 recycled uranium, which is quite extensive, 

17 focused on those three constituents.

18 I tracked down the source of the 

19 mention of americium-241 to the actual TBD 5. 

20 I sent an email to Stu about this, and he was 

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155

1 going to look into a bit. And I looked into it, 

2 too.

3 It turns out that this may be more 

4 important than we figured in the past. We kind 

5 of went on the assumption that, if DOE only 

6 mentioned americium in passing and never really 

7 did any analysis and gathering of data related 

8 to it, then there must have been some good 

9 reason for it, that it existed in such low 

10 levels that it wasn't really worth getting 

11 into.

12 However, when I looked into the 

13 production mechanisms for americium, it is 

14 basically a serial neutron capture reaction 

15 starting with plutonium-239, up to -240, to 

16 -241, which then betas at about a 13-day 

17 half-life, I believe, if I have got that right, 

18 to americium-241, which, then, alpha decays at 

19 a 432-year half-life to neptunium-237.

20 So, what we have is a situation 

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156

1 where americium-241 is the principal mechanism 

2 of producing neptunium-237. Neptunium-237 

3 was considered a nuclide of interest in the DOE 

4 reports, for which values have been determined 

5 in NIOSH's model. But, yet, americium, which 

6 is the precursor to neptunium, which actually 

7 has dose conversion factors that are about a 

8 factor of two higher than neptunium for most 

9 organs, isn't included. It also has a very 

10 high specific activity, about 3.7 curies per 

11 gram.

12 So, this is kind of the situation 

13 where it looks like if you have neptunium and 

14 you can't determine that americium may have 

15 been extracted from the waste stream before it 

16 was shipped to Fernald, you have got a situation 

17 where you are going to probably have to 

18 reconstruct doses of americium.

19 And so, this is kind of preliminary, 

20 but I guess this would be something for you guys 

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157

1 to take a look at. Is there a reason why 

2 americium was excluded to begin with in the 

3 original DOE documentation? Can we ignore it? 

4 If not, how, then, would we go about 

5 reconstructing doses?

6 MR. HINNEFELD: This is Stu.

7 I question the principal neptunium 

8 production avenue that you describe. I don't 

9 know that that is the principal neptunium 

10 production. I thought the principal neptunium 

11 production was a non-fission capture of U-235, 

12 because only five out of six captures fission.

13 MR. STIVER: Yes, there are 

14 different mechanisms involved. I talked to 

15 our radiochemist about this, and he seemed to 

16 think that the plutonium capture is probably 

17 the most significant, at least for the 

18 weapons-grade materials.

19 Yes, certainly in U-236 --

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, U-236 neutron 

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158

1 capture gets you to neptunium-237.

2 MR. STIVER: It is a very small type 

3 of --

4 MR. HINNEFELD: I guess the 

5 information I have received since we exchanged 

6 emails was that the americium was more commonly 

7 a contaminant in high-enriched recycled 

8 uranium; that, and the -- what was the other one 

9 we mentioned? -- americium and the -- yes, I 

10 guess that is the only one.

11 But it is primarily a contaminant in 

12 the high-enriched uranium recycle rather than 

13 the low-enriched uranium recycle. And so, 

14 that is why places like Fernald didn't look for 

15 it, but a place like a gaseous diffusion plant 

16 that was running higher-enrichment materials 

17 would have to worry about it.

18 So, I got like an email explanation 

19 of that. So, I think maybe what we have to 

20 do -- I just have always thought that -- and I'm 

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159

1 not a nuclear chemist -- but I just always have 

2 thought that the obvious neptunium-237 

3 production is you've got a lot of uranium in 

4 these reactor cores and a lot of uranium-235 in 

5 these reactor cores. And so, I think it is five 

6 out of six captures result in fission, and that

7 results in U-236, which would have some sort of 

8 data capture process and become neptunium-237 

9 in all likelihood.

10 So, that always just seemed like the 

11 likely one because, otherwise, you are having 

12 the serial neutron captures to 239 to 240, to 

13 241. They're getting the plutonium-241 in 

14 order to get back down.

15 So, you have a longer chain of 

16 serial captures to get through the plutonium 

17 chain than you do for the U-236 chain. So, that 

18 just seemed more probable to me. But, like I 

19 said, I don't know nucleonics, but, presumably, 

20 we can do some search on that.

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160

1 MR. STIVER: Yes, I think that is 

2 something we just need to run to ground.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

4 MR. STIVER: You know, what could 

5 be the primary mechanism and what would be 

6 expected.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: And then, I will 

8 also check on the -- we will have to also, rather 

9 than just get an email message about this, we 

10 will have to look at sources and what sources 

11 did this email message come from, and what is 

12 the source of information that americium-241 

13 was mainly in high-enriched uranium recycle.

14 MR. STIVER: We might also look at 

15 the sources with the neptunium that were used 

16 in the reconstruction. I think we used the 

17 highest micron percentiles, and that came from 

18 one of the source streams, but I don't remember 

19 off the top of my head which one it was.

20 But you might narrow down your 

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161

1 search as to the americium that would be more 

2 associated with higher concentrations from 

3 particular waste streams as opposed to other --

4 MR. HINNEFELD: I'm sorry, where 

5 are we going here now? I'm lost.

6 MR. STIVER: I was saying that, if 

7 you look at the review we did and the particular 

8 waste streams that were used to determine the 

9 bounding value for neptunium-237, it might help 

10 to kind of narrow down your search as to what 

11 americium content might have been associated 

12 with that.

13 MR. BARTON: Part of the reason 

14 this piqued our interest was that it was listed 

15 as a primary contaminant of concern in the 

16 original TBD. So, maybe there is good reason 

17 in the next iteration to remove that for --

18 MR. STIVER: Yes. If it turns out 

19 it is not, then --

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. Yes, right.

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162

1 MR. BARTON: But there is also, I 

2 know we came across at least one document while 

3 Fluor Fernald was running the site. And it is 

4 called Handling Uranium Containing Other 

5 Radiological Constituents. And I don't want 

6 to read the whole quote, but it said, 

7 essentially, recycled uranium can contain 

8 trace quantities of plutonium-238, 239, and 

9 240, americium-241, and neptunium-237. These 

10 isotopes can have significant internal dose 

11 contributions for relatively small activity 

12 concentrations.

13 So, that is sort of the reason we 

14 just, you know --

15 MR. STIVER: I might add --

16 MR. BARTON: -- might establish 

17 that we don't need to take a look at it or 

18 perhaps --

19 MR. STIVER: I might also add to 

20 that the DOE 2004 report on recycled uranium 

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163

1 doesn't mention that, and it is basically not 

2 saying probable line, those particular 

3 nuclides. But that never addresses it in terms 

4 of accountability.

5 MR. KATZ: So, we'll put this in 

6 progress, too?

7 CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes, but help me 

8 clarify something on this because we have been 

9 talking about a lot of isotopes. This is part 

10 of the raffinate stream?

11 MR. STIVER: No, this is not 

12 raffinate.

13 MR. HINNEFELD: No, recycled 

14 uranium.

15 CHAIR CLAWSON: Recycled uranium, 

16 okay.

17 MR. STIVER: We've reached the RU 

18 now.

19 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay, that's what I

20 wanted to --

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164

1 MR. STIVER: Remember the long 

2 discussions we had about whether 200 or 400 

3 parts per billion plutonium were going to be 

4 bounding. And so, there were three principal 

5 nuclides, plutonium, neptunium and 

6 technitium-99, for which we have bounding 

7 values for different periods of time now.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: But your original 

9 finding does mention the raffinates. Your 

10 finding does. We're talking about 10 here, 

11 right?

12 MR. STIVER: Yes. Finding 10 is 

13 really related to recycled uranium.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I understand, 

15 but it says, furthermore, the concentrations of 

16 trace radionuclides in the raffinates --

17 MR. STIVER: You know, where this 

18 comes from is some of the materials that contain 

19 these were -- actually, some of the ones that 

20 had the highest values were the reduction pot 

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165

1 liners. Remember the magnesium fluoride, 

2 which is going to be concentrate neptunium and 

3 to some extent plutonium. I believe strontium 

4 is another one. I'm trying to think of all of 

5 them.

6 But the point being is that some of 

7 these raffinate products would find their way 

8 as sources of these materials --

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, right.

10 MR. STIVER: -- through the 

11 production mechanism.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

13 MR. HINNEFELD: I think the 

14 bounding values take that into account, the 

15 higher --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: The higher, yes.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: The bounding 

18 values are quite high compared to what you would 

19 normally see.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

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166

1 MR. STIVER: I think it was like we 

2 settled on 10,000 parts per billion or --

3 MR. HINNEFELD: I forget what it 

4 actually was, the numbers that we arrived at, 

5 but they are much higher than you would see in 

6 production uranium.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes.

8 CHAIR CLAWSON: But the 

9 radionuclides or the nuclides that were of 

10 concern in this section -- because I thought we 

11 had talked about most of this is americium-241?

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, right.

13 MR. STIVER: Just to determine A) 

14 is it really something to be concerned with and, 

15 if so, how might we go about accounting for it?

16 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. I want to be 

17 clear because a lot of these sites are kind of 

18 running together. I know that we did talk 

19 about neptunium, but that is more at Hanford.

20 What is the half-life of 

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167

1 americium-241?

2 MR. STIVER: Four hundred and 

3 thirty-two years. So, it is important from a 

4 dosimetric standpoint.

5 CHAIR CLAWSON: I understand. 

6 That clarifies it.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Longer than the 

8 life of the Work Group.

9 (Laughter.)

10 Is the ball in NIOSH's court then?

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. Yes.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

13 MR. HINNEFELD: I think the ball is 

14 in our court, is to provide the backing to our 

15 statement --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: -- that this was a 

18 high-enriched uranium issue and, then, also, 

19 see what we can find out about the production 

20 mechanism for neptunium-237. I had never 

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168

1 thought of it as a decay product of 

2 americium-241. It would never be by itself 

3 without americium --

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

5 MR. HINNEFELD: -- unless you 

6 purposely extracted one or the other.

7 MR. STIVER: I know that is a 

8 production mechanism for using it for this type 

9 of research, and so forth, is to produce at a 

10 reactor now, to the extent that that happened 

11 in production after this point. And so, it is 

12 up for debate.

13 Okay, now we jump ahead, 25. This 

14 is something that is near and dear to the heart 

15 of Hans Behling. And this is about the radon 

16 releases from the K-65 silos.

17 And now, Stu, you produced a couple 

18 of responses.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. I will 

20 start.

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169

1 MR. STIVER: So, you might want to 

2 start out with those.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I will start 

4 out with my life since the last Work Group 

5 meeting.

6 (Laughter.)

7 Well, not my life, but some of the 

8 stuff I've done. Sometimes it felt that way.

9 At the last Work Group meeting I 

10 decided, look, we have this question. We have 

11 what I'll call the SC&A method of estimating 

12 radon emissions, largely prior to 1979, when 

13 the silos were, we call it sealed, is usually 

14 the term that is talking about. What they did 

15 was blanked off what had been an open gooseneck 

16 port that had been open to the atmosphere, and 

17 they also put gaskets and flanges on some of the 

18 other openings, some of the other penetrations 

19 that they gasketed up and, certainly, sealed it 

20 more than it had been before.

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170

1 There was an -- SC&A has proposed a 

2 method that differs probably by at least an 

3 order of magnitude in terms of annual radon 

4 releases than the method that was performed for 

5 ATSDR by a company called Radiological 

6 Assessment Corporation, or RAC. And so, I 

7 will, for the benefit of the court reporter, I 

8 will frequently use the term RAC during this 

9 conversation probably, and I am referred to 

10 R-A-C, Radiological Assessment Corporation.

11 SC&A's approach, SC&A looked at a 

12 set of sampling data which were in, they were 

13 reproduced in the RAC report. These were data 

14 collected in 1991, samples taken from the K-65 

15 materials, residues themselves in the K-65 

16 materials, and the relative activities 

17 reported in those samples for radium-226 and 

18 lead-210.

19 Lead-210 is a decay product of 

20 radon. It is the one that has -- it essentially 

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171

1 stops the short-lived decay daughter chain. 

2 You know, you have several short-lived decay 

3 products that we typically call the radon 

4 progeny, and then, it gets to lead-210 with a 

5 22-year half-life. And we don't have a 

6 short-lived half for that sort of thing.

7 Lead-210 is radioactive. It 

8 decays by a beta minus to bismuth-210, which is 

9 another beta minus decay to polonium-210, which 

10 is alpha down to stable 2 lead, so stable 

11 lead-210. So, we are all the way down at the 

12 end of the radium decay chain here.

13 Now in the reported activities for 

14 lead-210 and radium-226 there is a significant 

15 discrepancy from that sampling between those 

16 relative activities. Now, if you had a 

17 perfectly-sealed container, the logic of the 

18 SC&A approach is that, if this was perfectly 

19 sealed or even very well sealed, those numbers 

20 would be either the same, if it was perfectly 

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172

1 sealed, or close to each other because radon has 

2 a short half-life. And so, you would reach an 

3 equilibrium. If it were a tightly-sealed 

4 container, you would reach an equilibrium 

5 pretty quickly, well, as quickly as the 

6 lead-210 grew in.

7 And so, you would think those would 

8 be relatively close to each other in terms of 

9 activity. And they're not. The way to 

10 explain for this deficit in activity is that the 

11 radon escaped. And so, it wasn't there to 

12 generate the lead-210.

13 There is a second piece of 

14 information that supports SC&A's argument. 

15 That is direct radiation survey measurements 

16 that were taken on the top of the silo at various 

17 times in its history. Now the relevant times 

18 for our discussion right now are measurements 

19 that were taken before 1979, before the silos 

20 were sealed; measurements that were taken after 

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173

1 the silo was sealed, typically, even right up 

2 to 1987, and then, measurements that were taken 

3 in 1987 after the operation of a recently

4 installed radon treatment system, which was 

5 designed to remove radon from the headspace of 

6 the silos, pump it out through charcoal and 

7 absorb it on a charcoal filter. So that you 

8 have a direct radiation reading now with 

9 essentially the silos devoid of radon gas.

10 SC&A compared the dose rate 

11 readings after the radon treatment system 

12 operation to the dose rate readings prior to 

13 sealing, and they said these numbers look like 

14 the same to us. It looks like there was no 

15 radon being retained in the silos when they were 

16 unsealed. Whereas, after they were sealed, it 

17 did build up. There was radon being retained 

18 in there.

19 So, based on that, they said it 

20 appears that this deficit between lead-210 and 

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174

1 radium-226, this activity deficit is because 

2 the radon left the residues. Once it left the 

3 residues, it wasn't retained in the domes. And 

4 so, it was released to the environment. So, in 

5 simple terms, that is how SC&A arrived at their 

6 conclusion.

7 Now there are some complications 

8 about you don't know the starting ratio of 

9 lead-210 and radium. That complicates 

10 matters. SC&A chose a sort of middle of the 

11 road. It doesn't maximize or minimize. You 

12 would maximize release if you assume they were 

13 placed at equilibrium, and you would minimize 

14 the release if you assume there was no lead-210 

15 at the original placement.

16 And then, it also I think important 

17 to note that the sampling was done in 1991, 12 

18 years after the silos were sealed. And 

19 therefore, you would have some radon. You

20 know, we know some radon was certainly retained 

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175

1 in the headspace. So, that would tend to 

2 indicate that the lead-210 was probably even 

3 lower than what SC&A's calculated estimate was. 

4 You know, the lead-210 was even lower at the 

5 start. And so, the radon emissions up until 

6 1979 were probably even higher than what was in 

7 the actual paper, the 2008 paper that was 

8 delivered. So, that is kind of their 

9 technique.

10 Radiological Assessment 

11 Corporation had that same sampling data. You 

12 know, they had it in their report, and they did 

13 not elect that method. They said that they did 

14 use the direct radiation measurements from the 

15 tops of the silos though, but they didn't start 

16 with the pre-1979 emission rate. RAC started 

17 with the 1979-to-1987 period and said, during 

18 this time, we have radon concentration 

19 measurements from the silo headspace.

20 So, we have an estimate of what the 

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176

1 radon concentration was in the air. And we can 

2 estimate a release rate based on thermal 

3 expansion of the air because it was pretty well 

4 observed that during this period, as the air 

5 warmed-up, the emissions were higher. The air 

6 concentrations, the radon concentrations 

7 measured in the air close to the silos was 

8 higher on warm days in the afternoon, when it 

9 was hottest.

10 And so, there were also temperature 

11 readings inside the silo that they made a 

12 correlation with the outdoor temperatures. 

13 And they said, well, based on this, we would 

14 calculate that in a year you would have this 

15 daily thermal expansion based on how much the 

16 temperature changed on that day, and then, that 

17 is how much radon you would pump out. And then, 

18 you would also have some radon that would 

19 diffuse through the concrete dome. And they 

20 used a classic radon diffusion calculation with 

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177

1 some known and some assumed properties of the 

2 concrete and the measured concentrations that 

3 they had here.

4 So, they generated that release 

5 rate and said, well, from this release rate from 

6 the silos, you know, radon released from the 

7 silos, and this known concentration, you have 

8 a classic equilibrium differential equation 

9 here and the amount of radon diffusing from the 

10 residues into the headspace has to equal the 

11 amount of radon being removed from the 

12 headspace into the atmosphere.

13 And so, based on that, they arrived 

14 at, well, their release rate was not based on 

15 the diffusion, but the release rate was based 

16 on the concentration, the thermal pumping and 

17 dispersion.

18 Now the issue we run into when we are 

19 trying to -- I was trying to reconcile this. I 

20 said, how can you explain both of these 

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178

1 approaches? You know, what could be going on 

2 that explains both?

3 And I reached the conclusion that 

4 you can't. You can't reconcile that lead-210 

5 and radium deficit with what I would consider 

6 the known behavior of radon in residues. After 

7 RAC had an estimate from 1987, or from 1979 to 

8 1987, during the period when it was sealed, 

9 after they had that estimate, they also said, 

10 well, now we know how much the airborne 

11 concentration was in 1987. We've got these 

12 dose rates before the RTS was run. We have the 

13 dose rate measurements after the RTS was run, 

14 and we have these dose rate measurements from 

15 before the silos were sealed. They said, we 

16 should be able to develop a sort of dose rate 

17 per radon concentration factor based on using 

18 those external measurements.

19 So, when they compared the 

20 post-radon treatment system measurements to 

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179

1 the pre-sealing measurements, they said, well, 

2 these aren't exactly equal; there is a 

3 difference here, and that difference is about 

4 10 times less. It is maybe on the order of 20 

5 millirem per hour. The difference between the 

6 post-RTS sampling and the 1987 pre-RTS pumping 

7 is about 200 millirem an hour. And I am 

8 speaking for medians here. They actually did 

9 Monte Carlo calculations to compare 

10 distributions of the measurements. And so, 

11 the concentration must have been about 10 times 

12 lower in the headspace before 1987 than it was 

13 after -- or before 1979 than it was after 1979, 

14 when it was sealed.

15 So, that is what RAC was. They 

16 looked at the same external monitoring data and 

17 said the pre-1979 and the post-RTS operation 

18 time are not quite the same; there is a 

19 difference there. And so, that is how they 

20 arrived at their estimate of concentration in 

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180

1 the air.

2 And then they arrived at a 

3 differential diffusion of radon, but it is the 

4 diffusion of the radon out of the silo materials 

5 into the headspace, is the key question here. 

6 And that is the key. That is where the two 

7 mechanisms just cannot, in my mind, you cannot 

8 reconcile.

9 Whereas, SC&A's method has, as they 

10 wrote in 2008, roughly 60 percent of the 

11 material, of the radon being generated in the 

12 residues leaving the residues and entering the 

13 headspace. And they say it could be more than 

14 that.

15 The Radiological Assessment 

16 Corporation estimate puts the amount, the 

17 fraction of radon that would diffuse from the 

18 residues into the headspace more on the order 

19 of 5 percent as opposed to 60 percent. And so, 

20 that accounts for essentially your factor of 10 

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181

1 difference in residue.

2 The RAC also felt like pre-sealing 

3 the domes retained the radon very poorly, 

4 something like 93 percent of the radon that 

5 entered the headspace left. So, they didn't 

6 feel like the silos, before sealing in 1979, 

7 they didn't feel like they were effective in 

8 retaining the radon, just as SC&A doesn't feel 

9 they are effective.

10 The key element comes down to how 

11 much radon diffused from the residue materials 

12 into the headspace. And so, I can't explain 

13 the deficit between lead-210 and radium-226. 

14 You know, anything I would say would be rank 

15 speculation. I can't.

16 But, on the other hand, in its 

17 report, you know, RAC's report is 150-200 pages 

18 long. The appendix in their 1995 report where 

19 they talk about how they did their 

20 calculations, it is well over 100 pages long. 

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182

1 I think it is close to 200 pages long.

2 And they speak at great length about 

3 how does radon behave in things, in materials. 

4 Now a lot of these parameters were not measured 

5 in the actual K-65 residues themselves, like 

6 radon diffusion length, emanation fraction. 

7 Those are the two key ones. Those were never 

8 measured in the K-65 silos that we've been able 

9 to find.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, we discussed 

11 a lot of this before.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I know Hans did 

14 a pretty careful analysis. I am trying to 

15 remember the amounts of the residue, and they 

16 were pretty thick.

17 MR. HINNEFELD: They were about 

18 20-feet deep.

19 MEMBER ZIEMER: Twenty-feet deep. 

20 And it is intuitively hard for me to see that 

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183

1 60 percent of that inventory would reach the 

2 headspace unless the material is very loose, 

3 and no one has done a diffusion measurement. 

4 We don't know diffusion length.

5 I mean, a lot of that, you start out 

6 saying that half of it is going to go the other 

7 way, Number 1.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: Right.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: So, it is hard to 

10 see how you would get more than 50 percent to 

11 start with. And then, if the distances are 

12 enough, a lot of the decay occurs before it ever 

13 gets out.

14 And so, I don't recall what the 

15 assumptions were. There have to be some 

16 assumptions about, you know, if the stuff is 

17 pretty solid, it makes a difference, versus 

18 things where there is like chimney effects like 

19 you have in the Pennsylvania Reading Prong 

20 where somebody house, you know, the Watras 

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184

1 house, was it, that had all the radon, but where 

2 things can come up by some sort of a chimney 

3 effect.

4 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, I think that 

5 is part of SC&A's approach, is there may have 

6 been a chimney effect on the silos.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes, Hans has actually 

8 prepared sort of a final --

9 DR. BEHLING: Yes.

10 MR. STIVER: Maybe, Hans, this 

11 would be a good time for you to jump in.

12 DR. BEHLING: Yes. I am hoping to 

13 be able to get a chance to counter some of these 

14 issues.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, I'm asking 

16 because I don't remember from before. I know 

17 you had some good arguments for it, and I just 

18 couldn't remember that.

19 DR. BEHLING: Okay. Well, if I 

20 have a chance to give my presentation, 

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185

1 hopefully, I can clarify some of those issues.

2 MR. STIVER: Okay, the floor is 

3 yours, Hans.

4 DR. BEHLING: Okay. Let me just 

5 briefly, again -- I think Stu did a very nice 

6 job about summarizing some of the things, but 

7 there are a couple of areas that I tend to 

8 disagree with.

9 Let me just start out by saying that 

10 the SC&A model relies principally on two sets 

11 of empirical measurements, measurements that I 

12 will take at face value because I have no other 

13 choice but to.

14 In addition to two sets of empirical 

15 data measurements, SC&A's estimate also had to 

16 rely on one particular assumption. And that 

17 is, what was the starting disequilibrium 

18 between the radium-226 and the lead-210? And 

19 so, what I want to do is identify really the 

20 empirical measurements that were used in 

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186

1 presenting our model and explain how they were 

2 used, and then, also, briefly explain the one 

3 assumption that had to be incorporated.

4 And what I want to do is to 

5 describe -- and I think Stu already mentioned 

6 it -- there are two phases to this explanation. 

7 What were the releases of radon from the waste 

8 package inside the silo that escaped from the 

9 waste package, but not necessarily into the 

10 environment? And the second stage of the 

11 explanation is, what happened to the radon that 

12 did escape the waste package that may have been 

13 in the headspace and was subsequently released 

14 to the environment? So, those are two aspects 

15 of our model that I will explain in short order.

16 And what is really important now is 

17 also to understand what are the principal 

18 players. And I think Stu already mentioned the 

19 two major players for this assessment are, 

20 obviously, radium-226, which has a half-life of 

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187

1 1622 years, meaning that over the period during 

2 which this material was first harvested at the 

3 Belgian Congo and the time it was in place in 

4 the silos and retained in the silos are 

5 relatively brief periods which, by and large, 

6 did not really significantly affect the 

7 quantity of radium that was, then, obviously, 

8 the source term for radon-222.

9 Conversely, the second player in 

10 this whole issue is lead-210, and lead-210, as 

11 Stu already mentioned, is near the bottom of the 

12 decay chain, but follows the radon-222 

13 radionuclide which has only a 3.8-day 

14 half-life. But, at 22 years of half-life, it 

15 will, obviously, have a variability in terms of 

16 what the starting point might have been, as I 

17 will explain.

18 So, let me talk about, when 

19 radon-222 is released, whether it is in the ore 

20 or while it is in the silos, it has, if it 

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188

1 escapes, the impact of not contributing to any 

2 more of additional lead-210 that you will find.

3 So, let's start off at, what are the 

4 potential options for the one assumption that 

5 we had to really make in our calculation? If 

6 you start out with the fact that uranium ores 

7 are usually mined from deep mined strata, you 

8 have to also come to the conclusion that at the 

9 time of the mining the ore that now contains all 

10 of both uraniums, 238, 234, the radium-226, the 

11 radon-222, and the lead-210 are likely to be in 

12 full equilibrium. In other words, if you were 

13 to take a sample at the time that the ore was 

14 harvested, you would end up looking probably at 

15 a ratio between radium-226 and lead-210 that is 

16 probably close to unity, meaning that very 

17 little radon escaped, especially if the ore was 

18 mined at a deep strata.

19 So, in essence, we would start out 

20 with the simple assumption that, if we were to 

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189

1 somehow or other take ore when it is immediately 

2 mined and extract the uranium and establish 

3 raffinates that are close to time of harvesting 

4 of the ore, we would start out with a raffinate 

5 that would have an equilibrium value between 

6 radium-226 and lead-210 that would essentially 

7 approach unity.

8 But this was not the case here. So, 

9 let's try to figure out what would be a 

10 reasonable starting point in terms of the 

11 disequilibrium between these two players, 

12 radium-226 and lead-210. Let's remember that 

13 the ore, the Belgian Congo ore, was assumed to 

14 be mined in 1944. And then, these raffinates 

15 were generated both at Mallinckrodt and at 

16 Fernald, and they were placed in the silos as 

17 early as 1953 and as late as 1958.

18 If they had been placed in 1953, 

19 that is nine years removed from the time they 

20 were first harvested, and if during that period 

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190

1 of time, the full nine years, 100 percent of all 

2 radon-222 had escaped from the ore, you would 

3 still end up with a starting equilibrium 

4 fraction of 0.75. In other words, the lead-210 

5 would have the activity of approximately 75 

6 percent of that of radium-226.

7 If, in fact, the time period between 

8 harvesting and emplacement in silos 1 and 2 was 

9 at the far end of the spectrum time period of 

10 14 years, the starting point for the ratio 

11 between lead-210 and radium-226 would still be 

12 .64. And that is assuming that we start out 

13 with an equilibrium fraction of near unity for 

14 those two radionuclides and, also, that during 

15 this nine- to fourteen-year time period all 100 

16 percent of the radon would escape.

17 Now there have been discussions 

18 that perhaps the ore that was emplaced in there 

19 had initially been forwarded to the United 

20 States with the assumption that they would be 

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191

1 returned because they contained certain 

2 precious metals, including radium-226 and 

3 perhaps lead, that would be separated.

4 But I did a very intense survey of 

5 available data, and I am sure that NIOSH did, 

6 too. There is no documentation that that 

7 extraction of the precious ores was ever 

8 conducted. And if they had been done, the 

9 radium would have also been removed along with 

10 the lead, so that we would basically have 

11 another variable that we couldn't explain. 

12 But there is no justification to believe that 

13 that was ever done.

14 Now the only other factor that could 

15 potentially create something of a distortion 

16 between the two indicated radionuclides could 

17 be the actual extraction of uranium during this 

18 very process. And we do know that in the 

19 initial steps in the processing of raw ore, it 

20 involves mechanical crushing, the grinding in 

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192

1 order to produce uniform-sized particles, and 

2 then, also, the treatment with either an acid3 or an alkaline-based leaching process.

4 We don't know what that could have 

5 possibly been done, but on the assumption that 

6 it probably wouldn't have affected them very 

7 much, we are still stuck with understanding 

8 that an equilibrium fraction at the time these 

9 materials were placed into silos 1 and 2 could 

10 have been as high as .7, depending on the 

11 timeframe of either nine years or fourteen 

12 years. And that is strictly based on the fact 

13 that lead-210 has a half-life of 22 years.

14 So, what we ended up doing is 

15 looking at the actual empirical measurements, 

16 as Stu had mentioned earlier. And those 

17 measurements were taken in 1991 where they went 

18 in there and at various levels within the waste 

19 package, they retrieved samples randomly and 

20 decided to assess those particular materials 

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193

1 for their current levels of lead-210 in 

2 relationship to radium-226.

3 In 1991, in silo 1, that ratio was 

4 down to 0.37, and in silo Number 2, it was 0.38. 

5 So, it was essentially equal. In other words, 

6 if at that point you can trust your 

7 measurements, the absence of this equilibrium 

8 that we now observe would suggest that perhaps 

9 as much as 62 percent may have escaped the waste 

10 package and perhaps entered the headspace.

11 Then, again, in 1993, a second set 

12 of measurements were taken. In silo Number 1, 

13 the disequilibrium was defined at 0.42, not 

14 much different from the earlier version of 

15 0.37. So, that has probably been a statistical 

16 error of those two measurements. For silo 2, 

17 on the other hand, this disequilibrium of 0.38 

18 had changed to 0.72.

19 In selecting which one I was going 

20 to use, I decided to be claimant-unfavorable by 

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194

1 using the data that was generated in 1993 that 

2 says the disequilibrium in silo Number 1 was 

3 0.42, but for silo 2 it was 0.72. And so, I 

4 intentionally used those two values as my 

5 starting point for saying what quantities of 

6 radon may have been released from the waste 

7 package into possibly the headspace, but not 

8 necessarily into the environment.

9 And so, if I look at those two latter 

10 datasets of 1993, my assessment would have been 

11 that about 58 percent of the radon that was 

12 generated in the waste package in silo 1 left 

13 the waste package, and for silo 2, 28 percent 

14 left the waste package. And that is strictly 

15 assuming that these disequilibrium values are 

16 legitimate and that our starting point was 

17 using the same disequilibrium as we observed in 

18 1993.

19 And as I said, I believe that 

20 assumption about a starting point being equal 

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195

1 to what it was 1993 and projected backwards to 

2 the time of emplacement is a very 

3 unconservative and claimant-unfavorable 

4 starting assumption. And so, on that basis, I 

5 was able to calculate the total quantity of 

6 radon that was released from the waste package 

7 into the headspace. And I cite those numbers 

8 in our calculation, and those numbers represent 

9 somewhere around -- let's see here -- 90,000 

10 curies for silo 1 and about 24,000 curies for 

11 silo 2.

12 So, at this point, the argument in 

13 the past has been, well, whatever radon left the 

14 waste package, but now entered the headspace, 

15 in all likelihood most of it or the majority of 

16 it decayed in the headspace. And that became 

17 the second phase of our investigation.

18 And the second set of empirical 

19 data, then, became really the data that Stu 

20 referred to earlier as being measurements that 

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196

1 were taken on top of the silo in earlier years. 

2 And I am talking about the years that are 

3 identified in one of the exhibits that were 

4 included in my 2008 White Paper.

5 And in April of 1964, again in May 

6 1973, and again in July 1973, a series of dose 

7 rate measurements were taken on top of silos 1 

8 and 2. And at that time, the average dose 

9 rate -- I don't want to give each of the 

10 numbers -- but they averaged approximately 

11 around 70 to 75 millirem per hour.

12 Now one can conclude that those dose 

13 rate measurements taken on top of the silos were 

14 perhaps the combined dose rate contributed from 

15 the radium that was still left in the waste 

16 package below, as well as the presence of radon 

17 and their short-lived daughters in the 

18 headspace. And as we all know, there are some 

19 short-lived radiation emissions from the 

20 short-lived daughters that are gamma emitters. 

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197

1 And so, they would contribute if, in fact, radon 

2 was a major component of that dose rate that was 

3 measured on top of the silos. The short-lived 

4 daughters of the radon that had accumulated in 

5 the headspace would be a contributor.

6 And so, we have dose rates on top of 

7 the silos that were measured prior to the 

8 sealing of the dome in the sixties and early 

9 seventies that would suggest that the dose 

10 rates on average on top of silos 1 and 2 was 

11 around 75 millirem per hour.

12 In June of 1979, there was a 

13 significant effort put forth to seal the dome 

14 caps in order to prevent the radon being 

15 released into the environment. As Stu had 

16 mentioned, there was a gooseneck, a 6-inch 

17 gooseneck that openly allowed the air in the 

18 headspace to enter the atmosphere outside.

19 In addition, there was a whole 

20 series of manholes that did not have a seal. 

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198

1 And also, there were serious, serious cracks 

2 that also allowed the release of any gases that 

3 may have accumulated in the headspace into the 

4 environment. And so, in the process of ceiling 

5 them up, they eliminated any open, direct 

6 openings, as well as also sealed many of the 

7 cracks.

8 And then, in 1987, measurements 

9 were taken on top of the dome. We, obviously, 

10 realized that the dose rate on top of the dome 

11 had now gone from approximately 70 to 75 

12 millirem in silo Number 2 all the way up to 250 

13 millirem per hour, and in silo 1, around up to 

14 200-and-some-odd millirem per hour.

15 And it was realized that a person 

16 who might work on the top of the silos over a 

17 period of eight hours would be exposed to well 

18 over a rem and a half. And so, there was the 

19 reason to introduce the radon treatment system.

20 And the radon treatment system did 

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199

1 one thing. It was operated for several hours 

2 at a time until the reduction in dose rates 

3 ceased to come down any further. And it was 

4 assumed that that period of time, usually in a 

5 matter of hours, had removed 97 percent of the 

6 radon gases and, along with the radon gases, all 

7 of the short-lived daughters.

8 And then, if you look at the dose 

9 rate measurements following that radon 

10 treatment system, the dose rates from over 200 

11 millirem per hour were reduced to levels that 

12 actually look very close, if not identical, to 

13 the dose rates that were measured prior to 1979, 

14 before the domes were sealed.

15 And that can give you only one 

16 understanding. And that is, that change in 

17 dose rate in the post-radiation treatment 

18 system were reduced to pre-1979 or pre-1980 

19 dose rate levels on top. It means one thing, 

20 that all of the radon prior to the sealing of 

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200

1 the domes had, in fact, escaped from the dome 

2 airspace, underneath the dome airspace.

3 And what it means is that the 

4 releases were probably promoted by a large 

5 effect by what I had introduced in my 

6 description as a Venturi effect. And the 

7 Venturi effect has not only the ability to void 

8 the airspace, the headspace, in the dome, but 

9 by pressure differential -- and this is what Dr. 

10 Ziemer mentioned beforehand -- had, obviously, 

11 augmented the rate by which the radon in the 

12 waste package that the RAC people had estimated 

13 were only being released by passive diffusion, 

14 had been greatly accelerated.

15 And that is something that Dr. 

16 Ziemer had just mentioned beforehand. When 

17 you operate a house that is at constant 

18 equilibrium with the outside ambient pressure, 

19 you will have very little radon emanating into 

20 the house. It is when the house is relatively 

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201

1 sealed, meaning that there is a roof on the 

2 house and there are various devices that are 

3 operating inside a house, such as bathroom 

4 ventilation or a wood-burning stove that has a 

5 chimney or other effects, as you all know, when 

6 you stand in front of a door that is not 

7 necessarily a good seal in the winter months 

8 when the house is probably sealed, you will see 

9 a constant flow of air into the house. That 

10 means the house is operating under negative 

11 pressure to the outside barometric pressure.

12 And I believe this is the very issue 

13 that defines the silos. When you have a steady 

14 flow of air over a curved surface, such as a 

15 dome, you have something similar to what 

16 provides lift in an airplane at the leading 

17 edge. An airplane that is pulled forward by a 

18 propeller or jet engine produces a flow of air 

19 over the curved wing that, then, lifts a very, 

20 very heavy airplane into the air.

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202

1 And I believe it is that particular 

2 effect that was very critical in the 

3 understanding of how radon that was produced in 

4 the silo waste was allowed to emanate into the 

5 headspace and, also, by the same Venturi 

6 effect, was then released into the environment.

7 And on that basis, using two 

8 empirical sets of measurement that talked about 

9 the disparity of the disequilibrium that was 

10 observed in the silos, and I use the 1993, which 

11 is a very unconservative and 

12 non-claimant-favorable assumption as a 

13 starting point for saying what was released 

14 potentially from the waste into the headspace. 

15 And then, using the empirical dose rate 

16 measurements on top of the silo prior to 1980, 

17 when the dome was sealed, and then, following 

18 the use of the radon treatment system, and 

19 realizing that those dose rates now were 

20 essentially identical, meaning that whatever 

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203

1 accumulated in the headspace was vented out, on 

2 those two assumptions, I came to the conclusion 

3 that the radon releases from silos 1 and 2 at 

4 approximately the 110 to 120 thousand curies 

5 per year were, in fact, about twenty-fold 

6 higher than the radon release estimates, as 

7 generated by the RAC committee.

8 And that is basically my model. I 

9 have explained it the best I can. And putting 

10 trust in the empirical measurements and, also, 

11 consciously selecting a starting 

12 disequilibrium that is not claimant-favorable, 

13 and I have no other reason to believe that that 

14 is the real number that I believe was released 

15 from these two silos.

16 If anyone has any comments or 

17 questions, I would --

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. Hans, this 

19 is Ziemer. I have a couple of questions just 

20 for clarity.

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204

1 I think you said that you assumed 

2 that during the venting that all of the radon 

3 and the daughters would have been removed from 

4 the headspace. And I am wondering about the 

5 issue of plate-out of daughters. It is 

6 notorious in other circumstances. Is that an 

7 issue you have looked at?

8 And then, my second question has to 

9 do with whether or not you or NIOSH or anybody 

10 independently calculated what the contribution 

11 to the surface doses would have been, knowing 

12 the inventory of radium in the waste and using 

13 first principles to calculate, you know, using 

14 distance plus absorption to calculate what you 

15 would expect to be the dose rates from the waste 

16 itself.

17 Were either of those looked at, and 

18 can you help or clarify your thoughts on that?

19 DR. BEHLING: Well, okay, I don't 

20 think I have to really calculate it because, Dr. 

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205

1 Ziemer --

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I know 

3 there's measurements. I was --

4 DR. BEHLING: We know that -- let me 

5 explain. Let me give you what my feeling is on 

6 this.

7 We know that radon-222 has a 

8 half-life of 3.8 days. Okay? And as a gas, it 

9 remains in gas; it will not, obviously, decay.

10 So, when the radon treatment system 

11 is operating for in excess of three hours, and 

12 in the process the dose rates go from around 200 

13 millirem to 70-75 millirem again, which equals 

14 the pre-1980 dose rate in the unmodified domes, 

15 you have to draw the following conclusion: if 

16 you remove radon-222 and it is basically gone, 

17 and if that time period involves three hours, 

18 the longest-lived radionuclide that follows 

19 among the short-lived daughters is only a few 

20 minutes, 20 minutes. And that means that they 

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206

1 will be plated out. They have decayed.

2 And so, what, in fact, you are 

3 looking at is strictly, once again, the 

4 dominant contribution in the post-radon 

5 treatment system that comes from radium-226 in 

6 the waste package and perhaps the 3 percent that 

7 they all said, obviously, while you are running 

8 the system, you are constantly drawing in new 

9 radon-222. And they accepted the fact that 

10 maybe 3 percent of the radon-222 still remained 

11 even after prolonged hours of the radon 

12 treatment system, which I took into 

13 consideration.

14 And for that reason, I think 

15 question Number 1 goes by the wayside. When 

16 you evacuate radon, and that system has been 

17 operating for three hours, those short-lived 

18 daughters are gone.

19 And this is one of the things that 

20 we always used to do when we looked at 

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207

1 environmental samples or when I was in the 

2 nuclear utilities, allowed that sample, that 

3 air sample you collected, to decay for at least 

4 three or four hours to eliminate any 

5 short-lived radon daughters as a contributing 

6 false positive.

7 And so, I think I can reasonably 

8 answer your question Number 1.

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I agree with 

10 that part of it. I was thinking of the 

11 lead-210.

12 DR. BEHLING: Well, listen, I don't 

13 know if that is really a significant 

14 contributor to the dose.

15 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I don't, 

16 either. I don't recall exactly what its decay 

17 scheme looks like. Are there any gammas or 

18 x-rays from that?

19 MR. STIVER: I don't know if there 

20 are, but it is primarily a beta emitter.

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208

1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, okay. Good. 

2 Certainly, over time the lead-210 would build 

3 up in there, because there is going to be 

4 plate-out of those short-lived ones, and 

5 whether they contribute over time to the dose 

6 rate, I wasn't sure.

7 The other part of it, I was looking 

8 for an independent, you know, do the 

9 calculational methods compared to the direct 

10 readings.

11 DR. BEHLING: Well, Paul, I did 

12 not -- I calculated, obviously, in deriving my 

13 estimate of total quantities of radium-226 as 

14 a way of calculating what I would expect, 

15 therefore, the production of radon-222 to have 

16 been.

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, right.

18 DR. BEHLING: But, then, again, I 

19 would have to look at -- this, obviously, has 

20 to be done by a computer that would, then, say, 

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209

1 okay, on the basis of total curie content and 

2 the distribution in this waste package, what 

3 might be the dose rate exclusively confined to 

4 radium-226 standing on top of the silo? I have 

5 not done that.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: No. Yes.

7 DR. BEHLING: But I think on the --

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: No, I wasn't saying 

9 you should. I just wondered if anyone had done 

10 it, if NIOSH or anyone, just as kind of an 

11 independent cross-calibration of how the 

12 actual measurements compare with what you would 

13 expect from the source term.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, if I'm not 

15 mistaken, RAC in one of their reports did 

16 something like --

17 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: -- I don't think it 

19 was an MCNP run, but some sort of calculation 

20 of dose rates and expected, you know, with the 

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210

1 material in the residues, they kind of got the 

2 dose rate roughly that they measured --

3 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

4 MR. HINNEFELD: -- on the dome.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. Thank you.

6 MR. HINNEFELD: I think, but I 

7 can't find it right now.

8 DR. BEHLING: But, Stu, I do want to 

9 come back to your comment that you made in your 

10 presentation with regard to the assumption 

11 about the starting disequilibrium. You said 

12 that my estimate would be somewhere in the 

13 middle. It's not. I believe I intentionally 

14 erred on the opposite side, on unconservative 

15 and non-claimant-friendly assumptions that 

16 would potentially lead to doses or release 

17 rates that are actually less than what I 

18 calculate.

19 And so, when I defaulted to an 

20 assumption that the disequilibrium that was 

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211

1 identified in 1993 had existed at the time of 

2 emplacement, I believe those numbers would 

3 prove to be in all likelihood an underestimate, 

4 and therefore, unfavorable to the claimants.

5 And so, this pretty much explains 

6 the logic that I used and the method that I used 

7 and the numbers that I used to arrive at my 

8 numbers. And I will stand by them.

9 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I know. I 

10 don't argue with that. What I meant when I said 

11 that was that the placement condition that 

12 would maximize the release, you know, the 

13 calculation of the release, would be if the 

14 lead-210 and the radium-226 were in equilibrium 

15 at placement. If that were the assumption, 

16 then the release estimate would be maximized. 

17 If the assumption of placement was that there 

18 was no lead-210 present, then that assumption 

19 would minimize the release.

20 DR. BEHLING: Absolutely. 

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212

1 Absolutely.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. You didn't 

3 choose either of those. You chose 40 percent.

4 DR. BEHLING: No, but there is no 

5 reason to, but, Stu, there is no reason to 

6 believe that there was no lead there because, 

7 as I had mentioned, I started out -- my basic 

8 feeling was this: if you start out with the 

9 assumption that at the time that this ore was 

10 harvested, in all likelihood the ratio between 

11 radium-226 and lead-210 was probably close to 

12 unity, because there is no reason to assume that 

13 a significant or major part of the radon had 

14 escaped during this time interval, it was 

15 probably there since the time the earth was 

16 created. And if it is a deep stratum, the 

17 potential release of radon that would disrupt 

18 this equilibrium was probably minimal.

19 So, what you started out with, it is 

20 probably at the time that the ore was produced 

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213

1 with an equilibrium ratio that probably came 

2 close to unity. The only thing that now has to 

3 be accounted for are the nine- to fourteen-year 

4 time intervals between the time the material 

5 was harvested and the time period when the 

6 raffinates were in place in the silos.

7 And there, I gave you a calculation 

8 that says let us proceed with a very 

9 unconservative assumption that during that 

10 nine to fourteen years all of the radon escaped. 

11 You would still end up with an equilibrium 

12 fraction of approximately .72 and 6-something 

13 that I mentioned to you, which is higher than 

14 the assumed disequilibrium that I chose to use 

15 that equals the disequilibrium fraction that 

16 was measured in 1993. So, I was, again, very 

17 unconservative and non-claimant-favorable in 

18 my assumption.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I understand. 

20 I wasn't intending to argue.

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214

1 (Laughter.)

2 I didn't disagree with what you 

3 said.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: I have another 

5 question, though. Stu, this may be for you. 

6 So, you said in your report the diffusion rate 

7 into the headspace of the order of 60 percent 

8 is inconsistent with the behavior of radon. I 

9 think that is sort of what we were talking about 

10 before.

11 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, that is basic 

12 for access.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. But you did 

14 say you proposed to use the 95th percentile. 

15 In effect, what does that mean in terms of what 

16 that would look like relative to that 

17 60-percent figure?

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, the 95 

19 percentile estimate in RAC's report would add 

20 about 50 percent to our proposed release. It 

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215

1 goes from about 6,000 to about 10,000 curies a 

2 year. Isn't that right? Something like that.

3 And so, it would still come nowhere 

4 near, because, as Hans said, our original 

5 proposal or our Site Profile proposes 6,000, 

6 roughly 6 or 7 thousand curies a year pre-1979.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

8 MR. HINNEFELD: SC&A's report is at 

9 100. And realistically, if you used 40 percent 

10 equilibrium, which was seen in both silos in the 

11 1979 sampling, if you used that, their estimate 

12 would be higher than that.

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: It would be more on 

15 the order of 180,000 curies per year.

16 And so, you are talking about a 

17 factor of 20 or 30 difference --

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: -- between what is 

20 in our Site Profile and what the SC&A estimate 

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216

1 would be, and it is going to the 95th 

2 percentile; the RAC report wouldn't come close 

3 to bridging the gap.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay. Now, as a 

5 practical matter, recognizing there is still 

6 this substantial difference between these two 

7 views, in terms of workers and where they are 

8 located and what the impact of dose is, can you 

9 give us some feeling for the practical 

10 outcomes, let's say, from the current SC&A view 

11 versus the other? Are we talking about large? 

12 This is sort of this issue of what's a 

13 significant difference in terms of how it 

14 impacts the PoC, for example. Because we don't 

15 have -- I'm trying to recall the worker 

16 situation here. And who is getting the doses 

17 and what are they looking like?

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, the dose is 

19 assigned, essentially, to everybody.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, I know, but 

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217

1 what kind of doses are we assigning here?

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Oh, gosh, it is in 

3 our Site Profile.

4 MR. ROLFES: In the earlier time 

5 period we are talking about more sizable doses. 

6 I don't recall the maximum values, but I want 

7 to say it was pretty hefty, you know, exceeding 

8 what some of the uranium miners would have 

9 received, is essentially what we are going to 

10 be assigning for the earlier time period, when 

11 the Q-11 ore silos were open.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: The annual doses 

13 are going to be --

14 MR. HINNEFELD: We can probably 

15 look those up, but I think it would take us a 

16 little bit. It might be better to try to do 

17 that at lunchtime.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, remember 

19 when we were talking -- I'm talking about the 

20 SEC Work Group had looked at this, issues of how 

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218

1 big can the error be in your estimation if it 

2 is an error in a small dose versus an error in 

3 a big dose.

4 MR. STIVER: Something else which 

5 we need to consider is that Hans and the SC&A 

6 model is really applicable to the period before 

7 June of 1979.

8 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right, where you 

9 already have --

10 MR. STIVER: We don't seal.

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

12 MR. STIVER: And remember, we have 

13 got an SEC that goes all the way to 1978.

14 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

15 MR. STIVER: And, you know, radon 

16 is only going to affect lung cancer, which is 

17 an SEC thing to start with.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right.

19 MR. STIVER: So, you have got a very 

20 small number of people who are going to be

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219

1 affected.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. It is only 

3 less than 250 people mainly.

4 MR. STIVER: The model that is 

5 being used is the appropriate model.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. I 

7 understand, but I am just trying to get a feel 

8 for how much that is contributing, yes.

9 CHAIR CLAWSON: It's lunchtime 

10 right now.

11 (Laughter.)

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

13 CHAIR CLAWSON: I think maybe if we 

14 can take a little bit of time to be able to 

15 digest this --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: While digesting 

17 food.

18 (Laughter.)

19 CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes.

20 Stu, if you could kind of look at how 

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220

1 this is being implemented, this may help us.

2 MR. STIVER: If I could jump in, if 

3 people don't mind, I mean, the rest of these 

4 issues I could get through in about 15 minutes. 

5 So, if you don't want to take a lunch break now, 

6 we could just go through and close these others 

7 out.

8 I guess the question in my mind is, 

9 where do we go from here?

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: On this one, where 

11 do we go on this one?

12 CHAIR CLAWSON: Well, because I had 

13 a couple of questions. If you want to go into 

14 that, it is, why was this RAC report actually 

15 generated? Because it seems to me that there 

16 must have been a very large concern over this 

17 to have such a report written.

18 And I guess I have heard a lot from 

19 a lot of the Fernald workers, always the K-65 

20 silos. What stimulated this to be able to 

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221

1 happen?

2 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, actually, 

3 RAC was contracted by ATSDR, the Agency for 

4 Toxic Substances and Disease, something. It 

5 is part of CDC, actually.

6 MR. KATZ: Yes.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: And they were doing 

8 at the time a series of dose reconstructions to 

9 populations around DOE facilities. They did a 

10 whole bunch of them. And they did Fernald, was 

11 one of the ones they did.

12 And so, to do that, they estimated 

13 total releases from the sites of all 

14 radionuclides -- radon is just one piece of that 

15 report -- and modeled the dose to the neighbors, 

16 okay, not the workers, but to the neighbors.

17 CHAIR CLAWSON: This is for kind of 

18 an environmental --

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

20 CHAIR CLAWSON: Right?

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222

1 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. And so, this 

2 was done. This was a part of an effort that 

3 ATSDR did for a number of DOE facilities. And 

4 that is why they did their report.

5 We have just taken the radon 

6 emission rate, which was a part of their report, 

7 and said, okay, based on that and their models, 

8 what concentrations would you expect around the 

9 site? I think our Site Profile file says that 

10 the maximum concentration is here. Actually, 

11 we used some other information, too. The 

12 maximum concentration in this part of the site 

13 we are just going to assume that people were 

14 exposed on that part of the site and that they 

15 are going to get this concentration of radon. 

16 Just by working at Fernald, they are going to 

17 get this concentration to work from.

18 Now, in addition to the RAC report, 

19 there was an additional study done by some 

20 researchers at UC about radon concentrations 

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223

1 around the site. They used CR-39, which is a 

2 track etch detector. And they taped these 

3 track etch detectors on glass windows around 

4 the plant.

5 CHAIR CLAWSON: That is kind of the 

6 Pinney Report?

7 MR. HINNEFELD: That's the Pinney

8 Report. That's the Pinney Report. And that 

9 was a technique that had been demonstrated by 

10 other researchers, that you can place this 

11 track etch on glass that has been around, and 

12 you will get an integrated total exposure to 

13 radon progeny from the radon that has been 

14 etched, the progeny that has been etched into 

15 the glass. And then, you count off the decays 

16 from what is there.

17 They used that study and they saw 

18 that, man, the highest concentrations they 

19 found were not the ones necessarily closest to 

20 K-65 silos, although they wouldn't have been 

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224

1 terribly far. The highest concentrations they 

2 saw were right around plant 1. Or 2. One, 

3 yes, right around plant 1.

4 And they said, well, what happened 

5 at plant 1? Well, that's where the Q-11 ores 

6 were stored prior to being run through the 

7 refinery. Q-11 ores was what gave rise to the 

8 K-65 residues that were generated at Fernald.

9 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

10 MR. HINNEFELD: So, this 

11 high-rating content ore was stored for a period 

12 of time in plant 1 silos. And they concluded 

13 that that was a high source of radon to that area 

14 of the plant. And it drops off very rapidly as 

15 you get away from plant 1. So, they concluded 

16 that the major contributor to employee exposure 

17 certainly would have been in that area of the 

18 site and would have been from Q-11.

19 So, that also is part of the story 

20 here, is that there is this study that kind of 

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225

1 shows pretty high concentrations right around 

2 plant 1, more so than K-65. So, our Site 

3 Profile adds, you know -- and when Pinney wrote 

4 their report, they already had the RAC report. 

5 And so, they could essentially integrate what 

6 exposures to workers. And Pinney was 

7 interested in exposure to workers, right.

8 So, they were worried about 

9 exposures to workers. And they said, based on 

10 the data we have and the RAC emissions report, 

11 you know, the RAC estimate, this is what we 

12 think radon emissions, radon exposures would 

13 have been around the site. They actually had 

14 like individual worker histories and people 

15 filling out where I worked. So, they would 

16 say, for each worker, they could generate an 

17 exposure.

18 We didn't bother to do that. We 

19 said, they said the highest exposures were in 

20 this quadrant. We are going to give those 

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226

1 highest exposures to people who worked at the 

2 site, rather than trying to chase people, 

3 because don't necessarily have for all our 

4 claimants, we don't really have them chased all 

5 over.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: So, you considered 

7 those boundings were --

8 MR. HINNEFELD: We considered 

9 those an estimate of it, yes. And so, if we 

10 chose the highest location, we figured we would 

11 be bounding people's rate.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Do you know how 

13 those numbers compare with what you would get 

14 if you used the Behling methodology? Or do we 

15 know that?

16 MR. STIVER: It is scaled by about 

17 a factor of 20.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: Scaled up by a 

19 factor of 20.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Still a factor of 

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227

1 20 differential?

2 MR. HINNEFELD: It probably would. 

3 And the reason I say that is because part of the 

4 Pinney -- we have a research paper that Pinney's 

5 research team wrote. And it appears that they 

6 sort of calibrated their track etch detectors 

7 based on the RAC estimate and putting detectors 

8 at a fairly remote, like an environmental 

9 location --

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, okay.

11 MR. HINNEFELD: -- and said, what 

12 would RAC predict would have been the 

13 integrated exposure here at this remote 

14 location? And they in a sense sort of 

15 calibrated. I think that is what they did. We 

16 do have this paper. And they sort of 

17 calibrated their track etch detector based on 

18 that. So, it sounds like it would just be a 

19 scaling of a factor of 20.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: But they are 

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228

1 calibrating a pretty low level, then, if it 

2 is --

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, what they 

4 considered background.

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes. So, then, 

6 your error gets big.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes, you have got your 

8 error --

9 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, got you.

10 MR. STIVER: We have a Gaussian 

11 dispersion model.

12 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, yes.

13 MR. ROLFES: I did want to add a 

14 couple of things about the data that we do have 

15 available from Pinney. We actually have 

16 printouts of each individual's exposure that 

17 was assigned to them, based upon the air 

18 concentration and the location that they 

19 worked; basically, the work location on the 

20 site, whether they were working during the day 

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229

1 or night. When there was uncertainty, you 

2 know, people were placed into higher exposure 

3 scenario areas of the site.

4 So, we have those printouts showing 

5 each annual working level exposure value from 

6 the Pinney study by Social Security Number. 

7 And those are SPEDELite-linked into claimants' 

8 files in NOCTS.

9 Now we have also independently done 

10 an update to the environmental TBD. That was 

11 just approved earlier in March, I believe, of 

12 this year. And we have instructed dose 

13 reconstructors to use the Pinney data for radon 

14 dose assignment or in dose reconstruction as 

15 needed. And, also, if there is a higher value 

16 in our TBD for a given year, we have told them 

17 to use the higher of the two values, between the 

18 Pinney and our environmental TBD.

19 To summarize the Pinney values, 

20 there's a couple of excerpts that I was going 

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230

1 to -- let's see -- point out. Let's see.

2 It says, yearly mean worker 

3 exposure attributable to K-65 source term 

4 ranged from 1.04 working-level months in 1973 

5 with a range of .003 to 2.16 working-level 

6 months, to 0.03 working-level months in 1988, 

7 with a range less than .001 working-level 

8 months to 0.093 working-level months. Yearly 

9 mean exposures to workers in the area of the 

10 Q-11 silos ranged from 3.34 working-level 

11 months to 10.99 working-level months during the 

12 years when the silos served as a radon source.

13 And then, there is a separate 

14 excerpt that -- let's see. We have got some 

15 90th percentile cumulative radon exposure 

16 values from the K-65 source. It was 18.06 

17 working-level months and 31.52 working-level 

18 months from the Q-11 source.

19 Without reading the rest of the 

20 context, that will give you an idea of the 

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231

1 ranges that --

2 MR. HINNEFELD: What was that 

3 excerpted from?

4 MR. ROLFES: This is from the Radon 

5 and Cigarette Smoking Exposure Assessment of 

6 Fernald Workers, part of the Pinney Report.

7 MEMBER ZIEMER: Okay.

8 MR. ROLFES: And it is in the AB 

9 Document Review folder. I can point it out.

10 DR. BEHLING: Can I make a comment 

11 here because I think it is very important for 

12 me to also make a comment with regard to the 

13 Pinney Report?

14 I think, early on, and this was the 

15 issue of the Pinney Report gave rise to the need 

16 for a White Paper that SC&A wrote for 2010, and 

17 that was requested by Brad for us to do.

18 And the statement up to that point 

19 in time was that the Pinney Report 

20 independently validated the release quantities 

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232

1 as measured or estimated by RAC. And that is 

2 not the case.

3 And I brought this up in my email 

4 that is a companion document to Stu's White 

5 Paper over the last few days, but it is also 

6 something that I had written about in my second 

7 White Paper dated 2010.

8 And that is in a quote, and whoever 

9 has the email that I submitted a few days ago, 

10 there is a quote from the Pinney Report that 

11 clearly states that the Pinney Report did not 

12 validate the RAC release models from silos 1 and 

13 2, but simply accepted them and, then, coupled 

14 that data of 5 to 6 thousand curies per year 

15 released with data, from meteorological data 

16 for dispersion.

17 So, they did not validate the 

18 numbers. And whatever they came up with in 

19 terms of dose estimates to people onsite were 

20 essentially nothing more than coupling RAC data 

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233

1 to a dispersion model. If the RAC model data 

2 of release of radon releases are in error, then 

3 so are the Pinney expected doses to workers 

4 onsite. Simple as that.

5 And for anyone who questions this, 

6 take a look at what I submitted in my recent 

7 report to Stu, my email, where I take a direct 

8 quote from the Pinney Report as to what they did 

9 and how they used the RAC data. They simply 

10 coupled it.

11 MR. STIVER: Yes, Hans, this is 

12 John.

13 We're all basically in agreement 

14 with that. I think the issue really is, what 

15 is the proper source term to use? Is it the 

16 RAC's source term or is it our source term? And 

17 I guess that is really where it is.

18 I mean, you can model, from that 

19 point on, you can use dispersion modeling to get 

20 just about any kind of an exposure you want, 

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234

1 depending on the type of parameters used, and 

2 so forth. But I think the starting point is 

3 what really counts here, and that is really what 

4 we are trying to focus in on.

5 CHAIR CLAWSON: I guess I hate to 

6 say this, but I can understand what Hans has 

7 been saying on this from the start now to the 

8 very beginning of it. But the bottom line is 

9 this is what Dr. Ziemer has also said, what do 

10 we do with this? Because this is part of the 

11 SEC time period, correct?

12 MR. HINNEFELD: All except the last 

13 six months.

14 CHAIR CLAWSON: All except the last 

15 six months of it.

16 Radon is only going to affect lung 

17 cancer, if I'm correct.

18 MR. STIVER: It is.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. 

20 Theoretically, there could be some dose to 

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235

1 other organs, but it is going to be not very 

2 much. I mean, there's some that theoretically 

3 is distributed through the bloodstream to other 

4 organs. Nothing really concentrates radon. 

5 There is no organ of interest. It is going to 

6 be highest non-metabolic models, which never 

7 really gets you much dose, the non. Unlike 

8 other cases where we have a skin cancer, a skin 

9 dose potential, and you really want to give a 

10 fair shake to the non-presumptive cancers 

11 because skin is a non-presumptive cancer, the 

12 non-presumptive cancers that are going to be 

13 affected by internal dose, you just don't get 

14 very far, and especially not when you've got 

15 highest non-metabolic sort of dose to it. 

16 There might be -- I'm not going to say it is 

17 zero, but I don't know that it is --

18 MR. STIVER: It is pretty close to 

19 zero.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

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236

1 MR. STIVER: As far as a fraction of 

2 a millirem.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes. I mean, 

4 there's not much there, except in the 

5 respiratory tract and they are SEC cancers.

6 MR. STIVER: I guess the question 

7 is, is it prudent to dismiss the model and go 

8 with RAC, or whatever, based on the magnitude 

9 of the dose that might be involved? Or there 

10 is a question of, you know, find a model that 

11 has the best science for the particular period 

12 in time. Because if we didn't have the SEC, 

13 this would still be very much --

14 MR. HINNEFELD: Well, there's the 

15 SC&A report, which I can't refute necessarily. 

16 Is it better than the RAC report, which I can't 

17 refute?

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: And I don't 

19 think -- I know Hans has mentioned this -- but 

20 I don't think the issue is that SC&A's report 

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237

1 was not reviewed by the National Academy. That 

2 is not the issue.

3 CHAIR CLAWSON: No, we don't even 

4 want to talk about the National Academy.

5 (Laughter.)

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: No. No. And I 

7 think if the science is good, then what I would 

8 be looking for would be NIOSH's reason for 

9 disclaiming what Hans has done or else -- you're 

10 not obligated to follow a National Academy 

11 report necessarily. But, also, it is 

12 difficult to ignore it at the same time.

13 So, if we think there's reason to 

14 adopt this other model as being at least a 

15 reasonable possibility, is the science as good, 

16 or whatever we say, I don't know if you need to 

17 look at it anymore or not. You have looked at 

18 it.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: I can't reconcile 

20 that.

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238

1 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

2 MR. HINNEFELD: I really spent a 

3 lot of time on that RAC report and I got to where 

4 I think I understood it. I even got to the 

5 point where I am pretty sure in one of the tables 

6 that should have been at least values for both 

7 silos, it had to be realized the value for one 

8 silo instead of both silos combined. I got to 

9 know it pretty well, well enough that I 

10 understood that. I think I understood it 

11 pretty well. It makes perfect sense except for 

12 the absence of lead-210 in the residues.

13 You know, this is kind of an oddball 

14 suggestion, but we have an option of a 

15 triangular distribution with the upper --

16 DR. BEHLING: Stu, can I weigh-in 

17 on this? I hope you will take my statement 

18 sincerely.

19 When I was asked to look at this, 

20 that calculation was based on the assumption 

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239

1 that no one would be covered under the SEC. If 

2 the SEC extends right through the timeframe 

3 other than the last six months that might be 

4 affected by this, there's no point in doing 

5 this.

6 As was clearly pointed out, the 

7 issue of radon exposure only affects the lung 

8 dominantly, and that is, obviously, covered as 

9 a presumptive cancer. And it is covered, 

10 essentially, all the way to the point where I 

11 had estimated these higher doses.

12 So, there is really no point in 

13 investing a huge amount of effort in rectifying 

14 this problem. If this had been done at a time 

15 when the SEC had already been granted for this 

16 time period, I probably would have looked the 

17 other way and said, what's the point in 

18 discussing something that has such little 

19 impact?

20 At this point, I obviously started 

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240

1 this in 2008, was again asked to do it in 2010. 

2 And those time periods predate the assignment 

3 of the SEC Class.

4 And at this point, I would probably 

5 recommend to ignore my model. And I feel 

6 vindicated that at least you have given me the 

7 chance to talk about it and not feel that I was 

8 an idiot for having proposed this.

9 (Laughter.)

10 MR. KATZ: Oh dear, Hans, no one has 

11 ever called you an idiot.

12 MR. STIVER: No one.

13 CHAIR CLAWSON: No. No, actually, 

14 it is a little bit different than that, Hans, 

15 because I did request you to do this. And I 

16 personally believe that the work that you did 

17 is outstanding. And I agree from it. From 

18 just my simpleton way of looking at it, it makes 

19 sense to me, what you are saying.

20 But, also, too, the bottom line is 

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241

1 I want to make sure that the model and the 

2 product that we give to our customers, which are 

3 the claimants, is the best that we can. And I 

4 just want to make sure that -- you know, I know 

5 it is not going to affect anybody really because 

6 the lung cancers have already been taken care 

7 of by the SEC. But the bottom line is I also 

8 want to do due diligence and make sure that what 

9 we do is right.

10 And I'm kind of in a corner with --

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Well, I heard 

12 something starting to be proposed. If I 

13 understand just from the description, it is you 

14 can use both of those points and make a 

15 distribution, right?

16 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

17 MR. STIVER: Something else we need 

18 to keep in mind is our model is really only 

19 applicable to pre-June of 1979.

20 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes.

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242

1 MR. STIVER: So, it is kind of a 

2 moot point.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Make sure 

4 everybody understands here. In terms of radon 

5 emissions in the RAC report, there is a period 

6 of time where your K-65 residues were being 

7 shipped in from Mallinckrodt and sitting on the 

8 storage pads in trucks. And RAC has an 

9 estimate for that, that release rate.

10 There is a period of time when the 

11 silos were being actively filled. That goes 

12 from about 1952 or 1953 up through 1958. They 

13 have a release estimate for that and have a set 

14 of assumptions.

15 There is essentially the dormant 

16 storage state from 1959 through 1979 or -- 1979 

17 was --

18 MR. STIVER: Yes, 1979.

19 MR. HINNEFELD: The storage 

20 unsealed part from 1957 to 1979, and then, there 

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243

1 is the post-sealing, 1979, and their report 

2 only goes to like, I don't know, 1988. Yes, I 

3 think it goes to 1988 or something like that. 

4 But we have the estimate to continue on.

5 So, there are various things like 

6 that. If we use the RAC value -- and Hans has 

7 been most gracious today, and I feel bad that 

8 he feels like he wasn't valued. I couldn't 

9 find anything wrong with this work. It looked 

10 okay to me. I just can't reconcile it with 

11 other stuff.

12 If we stay with the RAC 

13 estimates -- and I proposed in the paper that 

14 maybe we should use the 95th percentile rather 

15 than the median estimate because for modeled 

16 exposures that's often what we do. We often 

17 use 95th percentiles rather than median 

18 exposures.

19 If we propose that, we would have, 

20 then, a consistent basis for those various 

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244

1 timeframes and things like that, with just the 

2 six-month difference between the end of the SEC 

3 and of the high radon release area. If we are 

4 okay with that, I think that would be very 

5 palatable from our standpoint.

6 MR. STIVER: Yes, I think that 

7 would probably be okay with me.

8 Hans, would you be willing to accept 

9 that?

10 DR. BEHLING: Yes, I will. As I 

11 have said before, the thing that bothered me was 

12 the blanket rejection of my data in previous 

13 discussions and presentations. And I think 

14 what was stated today satisfies my ego at least.

15 (Laughter.)

16 CHAIR CLAWSON: Well, we 

17 appreciate that.

18 And, with that, then that is how we 

19 will proceed, if that is all right with you, 

20 Paul.

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245

1 MEMBER ZIEMER: That is a good 

2 solution, yes.

3 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. Hans, I 

4 appreciate what you have done there. It is 

5 probably one of the first reports that I have 

6 really been able to understand. So, I feel 

7 good about it.

8 (Laughter.)

9 DR. BEHLING: Well, as I mentioned 

10 to you, I always go for the simplest approach.

11 (Laughter.)

12 CHAIR CLAWSON: Thanks, Hans. I 

13 appreciate that.

14 DR. BEHLING: When you can reduce 

15 something to the simplest methods of 

16 explanation, obviously, you usually end up with 

17 the best results. And I have to tell you, I do 

18 not understand how the RAC people whose data I 

19 used, their own data, failed to understand what 

20 I was looking at when I looked at their model 

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246

1 and came to the conclusion that they did nothing 

2 but make one assumption after the other, 

3 inclusive of deficiencies that obviously I 

4 pointed out in my report. And I have a tough 

5 time. Were they that blind to realizing that 

6 they had the data and failed to use it? I just 

7 don't get it.

8 MR. KATZ: Let's just leave it 

9 there.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: So, I am going to 

11 use that teaching standard in the future for my 

12 students, to make things that even Brad will 

13 understand.

14 (Laughter.)

15 CHAIR CLAWSON: You know, we could 

16 put that into a TBD, so even Brad can understand 

17 it.

18 No, you guys, really, seriously, it 

19 was there.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, that is a good 

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247

1 teaching method.

2 CHAIR CLAWSON: We may not be able 

3 to make lunch where we are at and be able to eat 

4 some and find food, but I personally would like 

5 to finish this off, if everybody is okay with 

6 that.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: I need a break 

8 sometime somehow. If we are not going to have 

9 lunch, I need to have a comfort break.

10 MEMBER ZIEMER: I do, too.

11 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay.

12 MR. STIVER: It will only take us 

13 about another 15 minutes to go through the rest 

14 of it.

15 CHAIR CLAWSON: Okay. Well, let's 

16 go ahead and have a break.

17 MR. KATZ: Have another 10-minute 

18 break?

19 CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes, and then, we 

20 will proceed.

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248

1 MR. KATZ: Okay. So, at 10 to, we 

2 will reconvene.

3 Thanks, everyone, for hanging in 

4 there on the line.

5 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

6 matter went off the record at 12:40 p.m. and 

7 went back on the record at 12:46 p.m.)

8 MR. KATZ: Okay, we're back and 

9 we're about ready to get going.

10 And I think you just go, right?

11 MR. STIVER: Okay. What's left 

12 now are the old SEC issues, 3, 4, 5, and 6(b). 

13 And I think this is going to go pretty quickly.

14 SEC Issue 3 is about the default 

15 concentrations of plutonium, neptunium and 

16 other isotopes in recycled uranium. This was 

17 the notion that it might not be bounding for 

18 some classes of workers and activities built 

19 into the time period as well.

20 I think that aspect has been 

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249

1 resolved for at least the principal three, but 

2 we still have this outstanding issue 

3 potentially of americium-241. So, I would 

4 like to keep that one. Maybe instead of in 

5 abeyance, we should go ahead and change that to 

6 in progress, just to account for the fact that 

7 there is ongoing work here.

8 MR. KATZ: Yes.

9 MR. STIVER: Okay, SEC Issue 4, 

10 this was the radon breath data, radium-226 and 

11 thorium-230. Okay, this is another one; this 

12 is very similar. This is the whole idea of the 

13 thorium-230, unsupported radium -- or excuse 

14 me -- depleted or deficient in radium and 

15 uranium. And this is something you guys were 

16 going to look into in regards to this is very 

17 similar to the issue of 7(a).

18 So, we just keep that in --

19 MR. KATZ: In progress.

20 MR. STIVER: -- in progress as 

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250

1 well.

2 MEMBER ZIEMER: It was in abeyance, 

3 though, before. So, why is it moving out of 

4 abeyance?

5 MR. STIVER: Well, wasn't this the 

6 guys were going to have to kind of look at a 

7 different approach for the thorium-230 in the 

8 plant 2/3, that issue? Because we talked about 

9 it in relation to --

10 MR. ROLFES: It is what Stu had said 

11 we could look at the DWE data.

12 MR. STIVER: Yes, the issue is 

13 7(a). So, this is the same. We could probably 

14 just go ahead and actually just close this out 

15 because it is no longer an SEC issue. So, we 

16 don't really need to keep both of them open. We 

17 have the Site Profile.

18 MEMBER ZIEMER: You have it in the 

19 other one.

20 MR. STIVER: Yes, and it was moved 

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251

1 to the Site Profile.

2 MR. KATZ: Oh, yes, that's true. 

3 Right.

4 MR. STIVER: Let's go ahead and 

5 just close this one.

6 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

7 MR. BARTON: Although, are we sure 

8 that thorium-230 can be estimated or could we 

9 envision a situation where that has to be added 

10 as not reconstructable?

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: We already have the 

12 SEC. Why are we looking at a --

13 MR. BARTON: Yes.

14 MR. STIVER: Yes. Once it got 

15 moved to the Site Profile --

16 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes, yes.

17 MR. STIVER: If it was reopened and 

18 there was an issue, I guess just we would have 

19 to take all of those doses as well. That's all.

20 MEMBER ZIEMER: Right. What about 

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252

1 Issue 3? Isn't it the same deal?

2 MR. STIVER: Issue 3, there is 

3 still an outstanding notion of americium-241. 

4 If it turned out to be --

5 MEMBER ZIEMER: That's an SEC 

6 issue?

7 MR. STIVER: Well, if it was a 

8 worst-case scenario, there was a dose 

9 potential, and there was no way to reconstruct 

10 it, then --

11 MEMBER ZIEMER: Oh, okay. Yes.

12 MR. STIVER: Just keep that one --

13 MEMBER ZIEMER: Yes.

14 MR. STIVER: -- on the books for 

15 now.

16 So, 4 we will go ahead and close.

17 Five, radon releases. Now this one 

18 we should have closed a long time ago because 

19 it is captured in Finding 25, which we just 

20 reached agreement on. So, go ahead and close 

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253

1 SEC Issue 5.

2 And that brings to our last one. 

3 This is 6(b), and this was the in vivo thorium 

4 model from 1979 to 1988. And we have agreed to 

5 accept that model.

6 MR. KATZ: I'm sorry, which issue 

7 is this?

8 MR. STIVER: This is 6(b).

9 MR. KATZ: 6(b)?

10 MR. STIVER: This was the second 

11 half of the --

12 MR. KATZ: Yes, thanks.

13 MR. STIVER: -- thorium-232 in vivo 

14 monitoring from 1978 to 1988, and we are keeping 

15 that open until such time as we have reviewed 

16 the post-SEC thorium. So, we have reached 

17 agreement on that. And this one can be closed 

18 as well.

19 And that brings us to the end.

20 MR. KATZ: Yay. Congratulations. 

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(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 (202) 234-4433
This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Fernald Work Group, has 

been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

information has been redacted as necessary. The transcript, however, has not been reviewed and 

certified by the Chair of the Fernald Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader should be 

cautioned that this transcript is for information only and is subject to change.

254

1 That's excellent.

2 MR. STIVER: It's only 12:47.

3 MR. KATZ: Yes. Okay.

4 MEMBER ZIEMER: Future plans?

5 MR. KATZ: Future plans. Oh, yes, 

6 timing, I guess, to wrap up.

7 MR. STIVER: Yes, I guess we 

8 probably want to wait until we have a chance for 

9 NIOSH to produce TBD 5 revisions and for us to 

10 review it.

11 MR. KATZ: Yes. I'm assuming we 

12 don't have a sense right now as to when we would 

13 be ready to meet on these things.

14 MR. HINNEFELD: The same 

15 disadvantage I always am; I've got to plug it 

16 into the project schedule --

17 MR. KATZ: Yes, sure.

18 MR. HINNEFELD: -- and determine 

19 what kind of resources we can get to it.

20 MR. KATZ: Right. So, when you get 

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 (202) 234-4433
This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Fernald Work Group, has 

been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

information has been redacted as necessary. The transcript, however, has not been reviewed and 

certified by the Chair of the Fernald Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader should be 

cautioned that this transcript is for information only and is subject to change.

255

1 to that, if you can send out a note giving a 

2 ballpark for when it would be ready.

3 MR. HINNEFELD: Yes, I will do my 

4 darnedest.

5 MR. KATZ: Right. I mean, there is 

6 no rush on that one.

7 MR. HINNEFELD: I would like to get 

8 this done.

9 (Laughter.)

10 MR. KATZ: Of course, it would be 

11 great to get it behind us. Yes.

12 MR. HINNEFELD: All my team leaders 

13 and my Associate Director for Science are 

14 conflicted on this site. So, I would like to 

15 get this one done and get the heck out of this 

16 business.

17 (Laughter.)

18 Let the people who know how to do 

19 this better than me do this.

20 MR. KATZ: You do okay.

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 (202) 234-4433
This transcript of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, Fernald Work Group, has 

been reviewed for concerns under the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) and personally identifiable 

information has been redacted as necessary. The transcript, however, has not been reviewed and 

certified by the Chair of the Fernald Work Group for accuracy at this time. The reader should be 

cautioned that this transcript is for information only and is subject to change.

256

1 Okay. So, Brad, are we adjourned?

2 CHAIR CLAWSON: Yes, we are.

3 MR. KATZ: Thank you, everyone on 

4 the line.

5 Have a good rest of your day, and 

6 much thanks for all you have contributed today.

7 Take care.

8 (Whereupon, the above-entitled 

9 matter went off the record at 12:52 p.m.)

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1323 RHODE ISLAND AVE., N.W.

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005-3701 (202) 234-4433